On 4/13/05, Bob Brennan <rbrennan96@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have a server which went completely unresponsive today on port 80 > for 20 minutes and would appreciate any pointers as to what might have > happened. > > A bit of background: > * FC3, Up2Date > * The Apache webserver serves a dozen virtual websites > * Sendmail + Dovecot + Squirrelmail for all sites > * Spamassasin recently activated (yesterday) > > The problem + observations: > * All websites were inaccessible from 14:00 gmt to 14:20 today > * The mailserver was running and responsive during that time > * FTP was running and responsive during that time > * telnet theServer.com 80 timed out with no connection during that time > > What I checked: > * all access_log and error_log for all sites - showed 5 users using > the sites at the time but nothing unusual > * no evidence of a DOS attack (that I could see) > * no records of anything unusual in system logs > * no accesses or errors in any of the http logs during that time > > Thankfully the webserver came back as if by magic after 20 minutes and > was immediately responsive. > > Any insights into anything else I can check? Needless to say an > embarassing incident for a webmaster who whould like to prevent it > happening again. > > Thanks in advance, > bob It's happened again, only this time I can pinpoint the cause. I was remotely administering another problem using Webmin on Firefox on XP, using the Command window. I wanted to see active services so I entered "service --status-all" which normally ouputs several screenfulls of information. Not only did Webmin fail to return the reply but all http services stopped again. Curiously when I minimised Firefox it also froze with only a blinking icon and had to be ctrl-alt-deleted out of. The http server was then offline for at least 20 minutes before it recovered. The last incident I can also tie to Squirrelmail and some intensive (buggy) HTML plug-in editing. This also caused Firefox to need to be killed. So my question has changed - obviously there are resource-hogging issues to do with Webmin, Squirrelmail, and apparently Firefox; but how do I configure Apache to stop these hogs from taking down my entire http service for 20 minutes at a time? Thanks in advance for any advice, bob
