mysterious server shutdown

buttnutt · 06-24-2003, 08:47 PM

Hello friends,

I have a Linux Slackware 8.1 server acting as my firewall/gateway to the Internet. On two occasions, I have got up to use the Internet in the morning only to find out that I have no access. I go to check my Linux server and it's completely shutdown and turned off. Very strange. I check the weather the night before and there was no storm. I am wondering if someone has hacked my system and shut the system down. The sever is brand new and I haven't had any hardware related problems. I doubt there is anything wrong with the hardware. This isn't a consistent problem, it's only happened a couple of times. Anyone have any ideas? I do have ACPI compiled into my kernel if that helps.

Thanks,
bUTTnUTT

unSpawn · 06-24-2003, 09:08 PM

Anything in the logs leading up to the shutdown moment? Verified the integrity of whatever is on the system? Checked physical conditions? Ram, CPU's whatever else in slots seated firmly, power cabling OK?

buttnutt · 06-26-2003, 04:24 PM

All the physical conditions seem fine. I can't see anything in the log. The other day, after this post, I did see the syslog daemon restarted 4 times in a row.

koningshoed · 06-26-2003, 06:41 PM

I'm having similar problems. I'm actually suspecting kernel panics (don't ask - see my thread on iptables losing packets, also found a serious bug in the ipt_ULOG code for the 2.4 series of kernels, suspect it's fixed in some version after 2.4.18).

It might also be DMA freezing up - there is a workaround in the kernel, but I have no idea how efficient it is. And as logging seems to be the first thing to go ... The first I usually see the machine is down is when I attempt to ssh into it.

Any ideas? btw, it's an old pentium 200 mmx machine, so it's not all the newest hardware, it can't switch off automatically and a reboot fixes the problem. And any hacker will have a really hard time getting into that machine, unless there is some unknown exploit for ssh2 (the only publicly available service). Unless of course, as I suspect the netfilter code is all haywire ...

unSpawn · 06-30-2003, 07:04 AM

buttnutt: does the system do a "clean" shutdown? Could you add a line (w/o quotes and note TAB) "*.*<TAB>/var/log/catchall", touch /var/log/catchall and restart syslog to see if it will log more info?
If nothing shows up in the next few days I'll prolly decide to move this question to another, hopefully more appropriate, forum.