[Gllug] Servers and other irritations...

[Mike Brodbelt]

* Matthew Kirkwood <matthew at hairy.beasts.org> [020801 00:36]:
> On 1 Aug 2002, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> 
> > imapd[29117]: IOERROR: writing HK^Q^HàT"@èT"@èT"@ðT"@ðT"@
> > øT"@øT"@: Bad file descriptor
> 
> Things like this scare me[0], because they often indicate
> a cracked service.  However, since this is cyrus imapd and
> now the evil Washington one, this probably isn't what's
> happened.

If it was the only thing I'd seen, I'd be frantically looking for script
kiddies, but given all the other grief, I'm guessing it's just a symptom
of memory corruption that's originating elsewhere. I did run chkrootkit
anyway, just out of paranoia...

> > Jul 29 12:56:21 castor master[256]: process 29117 exited, signaled to
> > death by 11
> 
> sig11 is a segfault.  It's commonly seen where hardware
> has gone marginal (esp. RAM).  See:

5 hours of memtest86 hasn't found any though.... :-(.

> If the machine hasn't seen a kernel upgrade recently, it's
> not likely that it knows how to report failing ECC RAM.

Hmmm - can 2.2.21 report failing ECC? Where can I find out what kernels
support this?

> It may be that you have bad RAM, but it's also possible
> that some other piece of hardware has gone flaky and is,
> for example, drawing too much power for the rest of the
> system to stay solid.

The thing has two 450W PSU's, so I struggle to believe it's power.
Unless something is arcing in there.....

> Matthew.
> 
> [0] Actually, imap in general terrifies me, and only
>     because of the number of poor unfortunate boxes I
>     have seen r00t3d through the WU imapd.

Some years ago, my dial-up goot rooted through UW-IMAP. Being a dial up,
I hadn't been paying that much attention to security.....

Mike.

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