Topic: Server Up, but locked out of Server-Manager and SSH

[djhomeless]

A weird problem has developed on my 6.5 Server. To my knowledge, no changes or new RPM's have been installed in weeks. Outside of minor CSS changes made to one of my sites, the server has been virtually unchanged for a few months now.

The symptoms, are baffling:

1. All sites are up and serving fine.
2. SSH is not accepting connections using either hostname or IP.
3. Server-Manager is technically up, but whenever you select to make a change, or click to view logs, the page frame loads blank.
4. Email (IMAP) hangs, using the webmail package. If using local client, it claims entered password is incorrect??

This is really bizarre. I unfortunately am not onsite so I have no way of hooking the box up to a monitor just yet, though I was able to get someone to do a hard reboot.

The only thing that changes on a day to day basis is the virus definitions from Clam. Could this somehow be to blame? Otherwise, does anyone have any idea what could cause the above??

Thanks All,

Geoffrey

[kruhm]

Sometimes you get this when there is too much load on the server.

I've gotten it because of a mail loop. When clamav ran at night, it continuously tried to check the new messages, eventually eating up all the resources.

I had to pull it off line, connect, fix the loop, clear the queue then back online.

[djhomeless]

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong on th box.

I booted her up on a monitor and everything seems to be loading up fine. Then it gets to the line item about starting up syslog, then the s**t hits the fan.

Basically, there seems to be an endless loop of errors saying something like:

multilog: fatal: unable to set mode of /var/log/dnscache/current: permission denied

It seems to go through all the services that hook into syslog. When I try to access the admin panel, the error logs take over the screen within a few seconds.

The box is still technically up, but I can't seem to get access to a command line to try and see how this happened.

I've tried to 'upgrade' using the 6.5 installation CD, but that didn't solve it.

The crap thing is the restore to desktop is failing, so I have no idea how to get my user data off the box (I am still able to browse the ibay folders and was able to back that data up).

Is there anyway to disable syslog on boot? Or is there a repair option on the CD that could help??

Geoffrey

[MSmith]

This exact problem occurred for me after a power cut (human error; UPS turned OFF, ugh!) partially fried the machine's hard disk.  I succeeded in Ghosting the install to a new hard drive but am experiencing the exact same symptoms you describe even after an "upgrade" reinstall.  I'm going to try to use Lazy Admin Tools at the console to back up the users etc. then try upgrading to 7.0b8 to see if that replaces the corrupted files/permissions.  If not, I'll just reformat & reinstall.

[MSmith]

Reformat & reinstall was necessary after all.  Oh well.

[djhomeless]

Yeah, I ran Knoppix and discovered a whole host of disk errors. This has only happened to me once before, and that was after a series of power cuts (no UPS). But then, it was easy to fix.

I'm going to try and backup the data and do a complete reinstall.

thanks,

Geoffrey