[Cialug] SUSE Question

[Josh More]

9.2 is old, 9.3 is new, you should upgrade. 
 
Now, before you think I'm just being an ass, think for a minute about
the 
SUSE paradigm.  SUSE Pro is an enthusist version.  It is designed to 
be upgraded every time something new comes out.  People who want 
a nice stable desktop are expected to go for Novell Linux Desktop. 
People who want a nice stable server are expected to go for SUSE 
Linux Enterprise Server. 
 
Now that 9.3 is out, 9.2 is not given as careful attention regarding 
security updates, so stability will be more and more of a concern. 
I would *love* to be able to point you to a SUSE-like community 
supported enterprise OS, but there just isn't a CentOS for SUSE. 
In order to work within the paradigm, you need to upgrade. 
 
As far as what could suddenly be causing problems, I generally find 
that this sort of thing is caused by a new exploit making the rounds. 
Long before you can get hacked by such a thing, you see system 
instability.  Right now, I'm seeing it with proftpd, but I have also 
recently seen it with ssh and apache. 
 
This also ignores any issues that may come from hardware that is 
starting to flake out. 
 
Good luck, 
 



-- 
-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP
morej at alliancetechnologies.net
515-245-7701

>>>sthiessen at passitonservices.org 08/08/05 5:03 pm >>>
I am running SUSE 9.2, I believe (Server's at the office and I'm at
home off today). My colleague called me up and said that the server
went down again.  It had been working for months with no problem and
then all of a sudden, it is acting a little more temperamental.  The
same is true for a client of ours who we helped set up something
similar to what we have. It worked for months with no problem, and then
all of a sudden, it is going down and then 20 days later, it is down
again.

Any thoughts what might be the problem?  I plan to investigate the logs
and such, but I am off today so I don't have access to them when
they're down (obviously). I will post what the logs say when I can get
to them tomorrow (unless I can figure it out myself).  I'm more
concerned with the seeming indication that it is becoming unstable.

I just know enough to get things setup and configure things and keep
them running but not enough to be an expert when things go wrong or
need more detailed fixing.  I would like to be, but haven't gotten
there yet. So, I thought I would check with you to see if you had
experienced anything similar and see if you had any suggestions on
troubleshooting tips for this kind of thing.

Both are being used as fileservers both as SFTP and Samba servers. Our
client's is also being used as an email server and a webmail server (I
know it is better to separate the fileserving and email functions, but
the client doesn't have the budget to separate the two functions at
this time).

One last question ... do you recommend that servers be restarted from
time to time?  If so, how often do you recommend that happen?

Thanks,

Stuart


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