server passwords, session ids stop working occasionally

L

lethal0r

Verified User
Joined
Jul 5, 2006
Messages
31
syslogd stops

every now and then, the following things stop working on my server (all at the same time) until i reboot:

ftp, ssh & login to directadmin control panel
website session ids (i use these instead of cookies)

apache still works fine, my websites show, but you cant click through the pages on my sites as the session id doesnt work.

It seems to happen randomly, I cant tie it down to a specific time period, or after I have done something to the server. It never seems to happen straight after a reboot though, always after a month or two.

I checked in /var/log/messages and it had stopped outputting 'MARK' (which is does every 20 minutes just to show its still logging) about the time of the problems. Does anyone know if this is to do with the problems I am having? Is there anything else I can check?

im running on debian 3.1.

any advice, things to check, possible causes etc.. would be greatly appreciated!
 
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im only using 3% at the most on any of my drives.

my two tmpfs drives - on dev and dev/shm have 252M available, is this enough do you think? perhaps I should keep an eye on it.

but any answers or things to check are really appreciated, ive posted on several forums but no one seems to reply!
 
ok thanks! well thinking about it further, I believe the problem must be entirely to do with usernames / passwords.

the php session ids are created by the apache user account. so just like when I cant ftp & ssh in because my passwords are rejected, presumably apache cant create a session id because its username or password is not accepted by the system.

does this sound right? does it help narrow it down to a possible cause?

i wish I knew more about linux but ive been using windows solely for years.
 
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i think / hope ive got this solved, the problem happened again but this time errors showed in the logs, something about an IRQ error.

a guy from my hosting company reckons its the hard drive, so its got a new one in now.

fingers crossed it stays up for ever and ever and ever!
 
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