Service crashing

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#1 Mon, 12/20/2010 - 08:19
impleri

Service crashing

Hi, I have installed Virtualmin GPL on Debian 5.0/stable. While migrating from my old server (Plesk9), everything went perfectly. However, I've noticed something strange in multiple services (Webmin, Usermin, Postfix). For whatever reason, they're being stopped (or worse, crashing) at some unknown time, possibly related to daily cron job. However, I'm finding no errors in the usual places (miniserv files for both, /var/log/messages, /var/log/kern.log, dmesg, /var/log/daemon, faillog, syslog, etc). The only sure way of fixing these is rebooting the system through the VZPP (even a straight CLI reboot doesn't do it). Any idea where to look for the culprit?

Mon, 12/20/2010 - 08:34
andreychek

Howdy,

How much RAM does your server have? I'd be curious if you're running out of RAM, though that sort of thing would typically show up in the kern.log that you had looked at.

-Eric

Tue, 12/21/2010 - 07:32
impleri

The VPS has a minimum of 640 Mb RAM (idles with everything loaded at under 240Mb). Considering Plesk ran on less, I don't think that's the issue (could be, but I doubt it). Also, do you think a lack of RAM would cause /sbin/reboot to not work properly?

Tue, 12/21/2010 - 09:33
andreychek

Well, if there weren't enough available RAM to launch the process, it technically could prevent the "reboot" command from working.

However, it may very well be something else :-)

If you run "dmesg", do you see any errors in that output?

Also, what happens when you run the "reboot" command -- what error do you receive?

-Eric

Tue, 12/21/2010 - 10:35
impleri

When the services have crashed, reboot reports no error. Dmesg is completely empty. I just checked and, after a few hours, webmin, usermin, and dovecot were not running.

# uptime
 16:12:35 up  2:41,  1 user,  load average: 0.02, 0.12, 0.12
# free
                                    total       used             free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:                       2097152     239360    1857792          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:     239360    1857792
Swap:                                 0                0           0
# reboot
 
The system is going down for reboot NOW!com (pts/0) (Tue Dec 21 16:16:09 2010

After reboot:

$ uptime
 16:17:30 up 0 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.58, 0.13, 0.04
Tue Dec 21 16:17:30 christopher@vps.impleri.com
[~:2]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:                           2048        186       1861          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:        186       1861
Swap:                              0            0          0

Yet Webmin and Usermin services did not start. After manually starting them:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:                       2097152     284160    1812992          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:     284160    1812992
Swap:                                 0                0          0

I put the part of /var/log/syslog (last lines before reboot to now) here: http://pastebin.com/iiR1pGCK

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