Sunday: Outage
Posted: 18 Aug 2008, 09:54
Yesterday (17.08.2008) we had a big outage:
Server was runing but no more respond to HTTP, SMTP and SSH requests. Only pinging was possible.
The reason if for the moment unknown. But the mail server had an queue of over 6000 mails. Its possible that to many processes blocked the whole operating system for creating new processes. Unfortunately the server was down the sunday. It was not possible to contact my provider (nobody works sundays). Remote rebooting is currently not possible. However this morning the server has been rebooted. I checked the data and started one service after another.
I changed the SMTP server configuration to limit the process number.
Most emails should be recoverd by a new backup MX service provided by DynDNS.
Some emails could be lost! Please don't use TrashMail for important data.
I hope the server will now run more stable.
I will think about a more cost effective redunant system.
Sorry for the problem.
Server was runing but no more respond to HTTP, SMTP and SSH requests. Only pinging was possible.
The reason if for the moment unknown. But the mail server had an queue of over 6000 mails. Its possible that to many processes blocked the whole operating system for creating new processes. Unfortunately the server was down the sunday. It was not possible to contact my provider (nobody works sundays). Remote rebooting is currently not possible. However this morning the server has been rebooted. I checked the data and started one service after another.
I changed the SMTP server configuration to limit the process number.
Most emails should be recoverd by a new backup MX service provided by DynDNS.
Some emails could be lost! Please don't use TrashMail for important data.
I hope the server will now run more stable.
I will think about a more cost effective redunant system.
Sorry for the problem.