The beauty of linux
Linux is great.. I have this old, old machine that serves as nothing more than an obscure email and web server for a domain hardly anyone uses anymore, but hey, it sits in its own little place on a friend's business dsl line and does its job well. This box is now up to 624 days of uptime and we're all being supremely careful about it staying up.. Really, perimeter around it, alarm on power button and cables and all that.. (actually, just kidding, but I've grown to enjoy watching the days add up..).
This box is old.. P166 with a dinky little 4GB hard drive that's now ancient in computer years.. This is where the comment "linux rocks" comes in play.. see, old hard drives tend to start having issues.. This one is no exception and it's starting to have some bad sectors.. uhoh.. better be careful, right?
Well.. (can you stand the suspense?)
This past week the shadow file became corrupted.. okay, no big deal, nobody can login.. who cares.. my friend is known for sprinkling VNC windows with open root shells all over the place so it's easy to replace the file from backup using existing VNC session.
Well.. then the passwd file becomes corrupted.. that's a bigger problem the box is now bouncing emails. Oopsie.. Same open shell windows.. restore from backup.. no problem.
Unfortunately.. the files restored freshly from backup got written to the same disk sectors.. can you guess it yet? That's right.. corrupt again! Well, solution simple.. sprinkle some fake-o files in the naughty inodes and write passwd and shadow to a nice, clean, non-corrupted ones.. Go figure it worked.
Why does linux rock? Try doing things like this on windows and stabilizing the machine in the process without restarting! The ancient, little linux box is still up and running and happily adding up days.. well, until more bad inodes show up.. But this is why we have backups :)
Comments
It really is great seeing such high uptimes on these machines, my firewall box at home also just keeps chugging along.
I did have a problem once, though when I did an apt-get dist-upgrade, changed my networking setup and a bunch of other things over the course of many months without rebooting. After the dist-upgrade I decided to reboot the machine, even though I didn't need to and everything went haywire!
To cut a long story short, I spent a few hours on the problem and figured out that since I had changed the networking setup, I had manually used ifconfig, etc to change my settings and had forgotten to update the scripts in /etc/network/interfaces to reflect the changes. If I had rebooted at the time of changing the net settings I would have remembered immediately to change it.
Posted by: kerneljack | June 3, 2003 06:11 AM
While I love linux and all it's rox0r-ness, maybe it's time you put a new drive in (or a spare one that I'm sure you have sitting around) :)
Posted by: Arcterex | June 3, 2003 02:20 PM
It is pretty sad when you feel like the most you have to do is setup a set of mirrored disks to never have to worry about your server going down. Of course, I'm talking about a FreeBSD server specifically, but the principle is the same in comparison to some OS's that shall not be named....
Posted by: Sharper | June 4, 2003 04:20 PM
Linux sux. How can you call yourself "unix girl" if you use Linux? Linux is not unix, it doesn't use any code that was a part of unix. Try a real unix like BSD.
Posted by: chris | June 5, 2003 11:35 AM
One would hope, that when posting things like that you would at least make sure to not do it from a Windows machine.. and if you wish to remain anonymous.. make sure not from an IP I can trace through some logs elsewhere.. (psst, I'm a sysadmin at a kind of busy site you're a member of).
Posted by: kasia | June 5, 2003 12:31 PM