I'm afraid that your answers eliminated most of the tentative ideas I had
about your problem. There are a few things you may find helpful, though.
>Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
>/dev/hda1 495714 405488 64625 86% /
This is pretty full. If you were running "who" as a user (not as root), it
might have had trouble creating a needed file in /tmp . I don't recall for
sure, but "who" *may* report this failure as a memory problem instead of as
a disk problem.
> 3:22pm up 2 days, 19:49, 3 users, load average: 0.07, 0.05, 0.06
> total used free shared buffers cached
>Mem: 34852 33776 1076 13436 10564 15928
>-/+ buffers/cache: 7284 27568
>Swap: 20124 0 20124
This indicates plenty of free memory. Of about 35 megs of real RAM, you have
over 27 available (the second line under "free"). Plus you have 20 megs of swap.
On the other hand, the slowness you describe is a classic sign of heavy use
of swap. If this problem occurs again, take another look at "free" and see
particularly if the swap is being used. This (probably) indicates a
transient load on the system from some source. Run "top" or "ps -aux" to
find the app that is using a lot of memory.
BTW, you didn't mention what distribution and version of Linux you are
running. I doubt this would by itself suggest anything, but if you do
experience the problem again and write about it, do include that info next time.
Also BTW, if you still are considering your break-in hypothesis, you might
look for evidence of it in wtmp (use "last") or in the entries that tcpd
(assuming you run it) makes in your logs.
At 03:30 PM 6/12/99 -0700, David Rysdam wrote [in part]:
>I don't have anything to connect the memory issue (if it IS an issue) to
>my ppp connection problem, except the fact that they *may* have cleared
>up once I rebooted.
...
>My main question is: Why the "memory exhausted" message from "who"? I'm
>perfectly willing to accept that either my phone line or ISP sucks to
>explain the rest.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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