Communications Office Report #8
March 8, 2004
Admiral Turtle Jerrar

Greetings,

The primary server that hosts ELS, MinosNIC, the EH Message Boards, and other sites was inaccessible for about 24 hours last weekend. It went offline at 18:53 ET on Saturday - I did not receive any sort of notification until about 18:15 Sunday. By 19:00, I was on-site attempting to resolve the issue.

It appears that some type of failure in MySQL locked the system. After rebooting, the server console would lock and the system would not complete initalization after loading the MySQL server. I was able to SSH in from another machine (sshd had luckily been loaded before MySQL) to eventually gain access.

Oddly enough, MySQL will still run, it just locks up whatever console it is started from. Not to mention, it killed the server the first time it crashed. Bugshooting is made more difficult by that fact that absolutely nothing is being logged (in fact, MySQL logs report a successful startup). I've tried updating to 4.0.18, but it has the exact same problem.

4.0.x has generally been driving me insane since its installation on the server. As some users have reported, there has definitely been a noticable speed decrease. This *might* be related to the new server, but I really don't see why - overall, this box is faster than the old one. I'm in the process of acquiring another 256 megs of memory for the box, which I'll probably have by next weekend. We'll see what happens with that. Myself and my other system admin are also considering moving MySQL to its own box.


Communications Office Links

http://www.ehcomm.net/ - Communications Office
http://www.ehnet.org/mb/ - Message Boards
http://www.ehcomm.net/request.php - COMM Request Forms
http://www.emperorshammer.org/irc.htm - IRC Code of Conduct

http://www.minos.net/ - MinosNIC
http://els.minos.net/ - ELS Management


Submitted,

COMM/AD Turtle Jerrar/CS-8/SSSD Sovereign (Paladin),
GOE/BSx2/PCx2/ISMx7/MoI/IS-2GR-1PR/LoC-CSx2-Rx3/CoE/CoLx2/CoB/LoA/OV-6E
{IWATS-AIM-ASP-BX-CBX-GFX-IIC/1/2/3-JS-LIN-M/1/2-PHP/1/2-SM/1-VBS-XML}