ImperialViolet

I'm sure there was something important that I was ment to reply to today but I can't remember what. I expect it will blind-side me about 4pm tomorrow. These things usually do.

IV was down over the weekend because the webserver died again. We have physically switched boxes for the webserver and it's having the exact same issues as the old one. Autofs is causing a kernel oops that then locks up VFS layer and after that the webserver is a little useless.

The maintainer of the code in question (net/sunrpc) has had a look at the stack traces and can't see anything wrong so we are going to see if it happens again (with a 2.4.21 kernel) and start stripping out patches until we can reproduce it in a stock kernel. At that point we add debugging code to try and trap where the dodgy data structure is going dodgy. All on our primary webserver - wonderful.

And...

iptables -P INPUT DROP ; iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --destination-port=22 -j ACCEPT

just made my server drop off the face of the net. That really should have been in one packet, damm you fragments.

Oh, and train operating staff will be able to use swab kits to add people who spit at them to the UK DNA database. Charming.