[Techtalk] Anybody out there?

[Alexandra West]

Hi again,

Thanks very much for responding. Unfortunately, I didn't receive your
answer until last Saturday when everything was over.
Although I didn't manage to get any technical advice on my specific
problems this time round, I would like to say how good it is to know of
Linuxchix. There isn't a list which is less intimidating, where the tone
is friendlier. I had to look at quite a few other lists over the past
few days and the sometimes hostile tone towards people perceived to be
less technically versed really annoyed me. I never get that feeling from
Linuxchix and I am grateful for this environment in which you are
allowed to admit that you don't know everything (yet:-).

Just to sum up briefly what I was dealing with last week:
My problems at work were a number of related issues and some unrelated.

/var had umounted itself and was returning I/O errors. It really
surprised me because it's RAID 5 configured across 7 disks with 2 hot
spare. Still don't know what caused it to umount itself (which was the
second time in 7 months!) but ran xfs_repair on it and that seems to
have made it happier. For the moment, that is.

With it we had a string of other related and unrelated problems,
including an unhappy mail configuration because clamav kept falling over
which sendmail didn't like.
Not to mention slight problems with our amanda backups because there
seemed to be a problem with the SCSI controller for our DLT tape drive.

But... my manager is back, /var is still up (and I've heard my manager's
theory on why it happens, to do with cyrus), our amanda backups are
working again for the moment and I'm now completely happy cleaning up
after clamav and restarting it.

Sorry for the panicked email. I didn't want to go into lots of detail
without knowing whether there was anybody there and it was just as well
since I didn't receive any linuxchix mails for several days (and I'm
subscribed twice, at home and at work).

Alexandra

On 06/12/03 19:27 Sara wrote:
> Describe away.
> 
> You'd get much more help much faster if you described in the same email
> as you asked "anyone out there?" ;) 
> 
> "Caving in on all fronts" sounds scary. Like hard-drive-dying scary, or
> hacked-box scary. First thing I'd do is back up whatever you can (new
> backup--don't overwrite backup media!!!) just in case something's on its
> way out. Always better safe than sorry. 
> 
> -Sara
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: techtalk-bounces at linuxchix.org [mailto:techtalk-
>> bounces at linuxchix.org] On Behalf Of Alexandra O'Connor
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 11:35 PM
>> To: techtalk at linuxchix.org
>> Subject: [Techtalk] Anybody out there?
>> 
>> Hello there,
>> 
>> Is anybody out there right now? Anybody who could try to help me with
> a
>> number of problems on my server? My boss is on holiday and the system
> is
>> caving in on all sorts of fronts. It seems to be getting worse and I
>> need some help to make sense of what's happening.
>> If someone is there, I'll start describing the problems.
>> 
>> Alexandra
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Techtalk mailing list
>> Techtalk at linuxchix.org
>> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Techtalk mailing list
> Techtalk at linuxchix.org
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk

--