[Wylug-discuss] System Crash

[Mark P. Conmy]

On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Andy Davidson wrote:
> On 6 Jul 2007, at 21:09, Mark P. Conmy wrote:
>
>> As you say it's run without problem for more than three years then
>> unless you've done an upgrade recently, I'd suspect hardware degradation
>> and keep an eye on it.
>
> The box has been up for three years; slight memory leaks in a three year old 
> kernel's tcpstack, or socket handler or ... ... would have caused the box to 
> respond to icmp but not be able to start new daemon connections.
>
> Security > Uptime.
>
> The kernel needs upgrading.
>
> In my humble opinion ;-)

Ah - I read it as "the system was working without problems for over 3
years" rather than it running literally non-stop for three years.
Whilst the latter isn't impossible by any stretch (been there, done
that), security issues make it unwise and the former seems more likely.

Mark: was it running without reboot?

Even if it was (mind you), there is still the issue of _why_ it froze;
memory leaks are far more likely to create noticeable userspace effects
(OOM handler triggers) long before the kernel stack maxs out to the
point it stalls IME...

Mark