On Fri, May 12, 2006 10:03 pm, Joel Rees wrote: > > On 2006.5.12, at 08:54 PM, Mike Schienle wrote: >> >> On Fri, May 12, 2006 7:40 am, Mike Schienle wrote: >>> >>> On Fri, May 12, 2006 7:05 am, Joel Rees wrote: >>>> >>>> On 2006.5.12, at 10:01 AM, Mike Schienle wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Hi all - >>>>> >>>>> I just installed an Intel Mac Mini as a replacement for a dual 1.8 >>>>> GHz >>>>> G5 at >>>>> my colocation place a couple days ago. >>>> >>>> Can I ask a silly question in public, or would off-list be more >>>> appropriate? >>> >>> I thought that would raise an eyebrow :-) > > Heh. Some trolls, at any rate, are not evil. > >>> The G5 began having stability problems. It would stop authenticating >>> users >>> (email, ftp, logins, etc. would fail, but web server would continue) >>> after >>> anywhere from 2 to 24 hours. > > My instant reaction to that would have been putting a stripped-down > whitebox running OpenBSD as a logging firewall between the G5 and the > 'net, to check for attacks on the mail and ftp subsystems. Attempts to > install a trojan for the wrong processor might have been causing DOS on > the attacked services?
I can't rule anything out since I haven't nailed the solution yet. There were the occasional attempts at breaking in, but nothing concerted and none of the attempts succeeded or corresponded to the problem times. One thing that seems odd to me is that if I did a lot of things either interactively or via cron that continued to authenticate, such as ssh and ftp, it would typically stay up longer than if I let it just idle. It wasn't consistent though. It could stay up for 24 hours, an hour, or anywhere in between, but it tended toward the longer time frame. I'm not completely convinced this is a hardware issue, but the colocation guys and a couple other folks who play with hardware and systems often enough have said that it appears to be RAM or PSU. We eliminated the RAM issue last week. > (I should check whether OpenBSD has drivers for IP over firewire or for > the USB to ethernet converters. If so, a Mini might do as well as a > whitebox with two NICs.) >>> That >>> actually made things worse, it went from failing to authenticate to >>> complete >>> lockups within a few minutes, so back to the original setup thanks to >>> being >>> able to shuffle things around with the spare disks. > > Could be an unrelated problem? A definite maybe. My wife is a massage therapist and has "gifted" hands. She's cured a couple printers and some bike computers in her time, not to mention several hundred backs and shoulders. Unfortunately, the G5 went from the colo in Dallas, flew home to Chicago, and is now with me in Maine after a couple days of driving, without ever getting out of the box for her to lay hands on it. I have a new gig here in Maine starting Monday, the original message in this thread was from an undisclosed/unknown location in Ohio. >>> As >>> soon as >>> that happens I expect to put the G5 back. > > And here I was thinking that someone in your organization had requested > the G5 for the art department. ;:-/ Well, the organization consists of my wife and I. No recent requests have come through, other than "replace that POS with something we don't have to worry about." This was after a week or so of wondering what the hell was going on and a couple weeks of actively trying to solve it. I feel like I bet the farm when I picked up the Mini. That could have gone wrong so many different ways, but has worked out fine so far. > Another swag might be the CPU or the heat sink? Thanks. I'll add those to the dart board. > Yeah, the notebook grade disk will slow the thing down, about 15% would > not be unexpected. RAM reduction will tend to have more drastic effects > when it has effects. I'm not familiar enough with FW400 to hazard a > guess, although I have a gut feeling the difference is not that big > unless there's constant bulk (>100MB) raw data motion. > > 20 minutes is a long query, indeed. I'd be tempted, once you have the > G5 back up, to keep the Mini on-line and run the DB on the one and the > web server on the other. One of the things that squelches that temptation is the colocation fee for a 2nd system, but yeah, that would be nice. Regarding the query length, I've done what I can with setting up indexes, but I haven't studied MySQL's plan for it. The application finished up about the same time this problem showed up (the authentication problem still occurs whether this program runs or not, and predates the program by a couple weeks). I'm sure I'll find a couple things in there to speed it up, hopefully in a big way. At the moment, it just gets kicked off at dawn, so there's no real time rush, but it's always nice to have an optimal solution. > One reason I was interested, if you were planning to keep the Mini on > line, I'd be interested in what strategies you have for wear and tear, > my experience being that notebook-grade disks running full-time tend to > burn out after about a year. Without really giving it much thought, I just considered the Mini "not a server" and didn't want to leave it there indefinitely. As far as the disk life is concerned, the only strategy I have is keeping the external 80 GB disk there as a backup if the internal should go tango uniform. The external 250 GB has no local backup, but does get Retrospect'ed every night across the net. I should hedge the shipping expenses by investing in FedEx this year. I can give the colo folks another giggle and send out my 40 GB iPod Photo as a backup drive. > I have my personal web site on my old clamshell iBook, and it runs a > dynamic DNS client every ten minutes via cron. That basically keeps the > disk spinning constantly. Burned out a drive last year, and I'm worried > it will burn out a drive this year. So I'm thinking of putting the > client on a RAM disk, although, since I wrote the client in perl, I > suspect that I'd then have to copy perl itself to the RAM disk as well. > Another thought would be, since I really don't need it to run exactly > at a specific time, to simply keep the client process running in a > sleep loop. Sounds entertaining. My old Pismo burned out a drive about two years ago. I had purchased a 60 GB drive to replace the original 12 GB one. I got just under three years out of it, which was the warranty length, so I got a new one. A couple months later I gave the Pismo to the local school district. I tossed the 12 GB disk back in and it worked fine. The 60 GB disk lives on in a portable enclosure on my G4 Powerbook. I basically keep the iLife stuff on it, since that's not a major use for me, but takes up a lot of disk space. Oh yeah, we have a G4/800 iMac that lost its drive about the same time all of the server stuff was happening. I still need to get a drive for it. Maybe on the next trip back home. Mike Schienle
