Ray,
Thanks for the ideas. Fortunately, the server is acting up again
right now, so I'll elaborate, below:
> "refusing connections" isn't completely clear as a problem description. What
> is the system actually doing that you characterize this way? That is, what
> does a "refusal" look like on the machine that attempts unsuccessfully to
> connect to the service?
>From a remote system, Netscape reports "Netscape's network
connection was refused by the server linux.innoved.org. The server may
not be accepting connections or may be busy. Try connecting again later."
Telnet reports: "telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection
refused"
ftp reports: "ftp: connect: Connection refused"
> 1. Are you running all 3 services through inetd, or are you running Web
> service directly? If the first, might there be intermittant DNS-based
> authentication problems?
I'm running Web service directly, not under inetd. I think DNS problems
can be ruled out, because I get the same errors when I try accessing the
server using its IP address. (Also the problems occur when accessing
these services from the machine itself; it won't even serve to localhost.)
For #'s 2 and 3, I'll have to wait until I can get up to that building
later tonight... or it starts serving again.
> 2. What do the logs (syslogd logs for ftp and telnet, apache (I'm guessing
> here) logs for http) say about example refused connections?
>
> 3. If you can check it, at a point when it is actually refusing connections,
> or just afterward, what does "free" report? Might the system just be very
> slow due to swapping? 32 megs isn't much for a server these days.
The machine is getting only very light usage right now; in fact, most of
the hits are from me or my office colleague, so I highly doubt that RAM
would be a problem. But I will check when I get the chance.
> 4. What type and speed of connection are the service requests coming in
> over? Might ther be a problem with the interface?
Both machines are on the campus network at Washington State University,
whose backbone is fiber optic cable, but at both ends the connection
terminates in 10baseT on small unmanaged hubs.
I thought this might be a problem too, but (and I forgot to mention this
earlier) when the server is acting up it also refuses connections from
localhost; i.e., when I'm sitting at the actual machine, doing "lynx
localhost," "telnet localhost," etc.
My own wild guess was that someone was hacking in and bringing down my
services, so last night I changed all the passwords and modified
/etc/syslog.conf so that it would store logs on another machine.
> At 09:05 PM 6/26/00 -0700, Jeff Nelson wrote:
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I have encountered a problem that I've never seen before, so I'm hoping
> >that some of you folks with more experience can give me some clues as to
> >what's going on...
> >
> >My Linux server runs on a Pentium Pro 180 with 32MB of RAM, a 3c509
> >network card, anda 2.2 GB hard drive with roughly equal / and /home
> >partitions, as well as a 128MB swap partition. As of last week I was
> >running Red Hat 6.1. I'm running it as a web, ftp, mail, and telnet
> >server.
> >
> >Last week I suddenly found that it was refusing web, ftp, and telnet
> >connections. (I didn't test mail connections.) However, the machine was
> >still on and running. Rebooting seemed to fix the problem. Then the
> >problem returned a couple of days later.
> >
> >Although rebooting temporarily solved this problem again, I didn't want to
> >be bothered with it in the future, and being busy with other projects, I
> >didn't think I would have time to do a thorough troubleshooting, and since
> >I was thinking about changing to Mandrake anyway, leaving the home
> >partition in place I made a fresh installation of Mandrake 6.1 and soon
> >had all the previous services back working.
> >
> >Unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem; today it was refusing
> >connections again. Most puzzling, when I came to the server room to check
> >it out, it started (or had already started, possibly) working again. (All
> >I did was log in as root open localhost with lynx.)
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