paw@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Pat Wilson) (05/02/91)
Pretty weird... For the last two days I've had /etc/syslogd go nuts and start forking copies of itself (filling up the process table along the way). I don't _think_ I've changed anything lately that would affect syslogd... The trigger is unknown at the moment, and isn't anything obvious. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? Any ideas where to start looking for the cause? I've rebooted (though not powered down) once since this started, but it hasn't cured the problem. It only seems to be happening on this one machine (I've got 14 320s, most of which are clones of the machine having the problem). I'm running 3003 on a 320 with 16Mb RAM and 64Mb swap. Thanks. -- Pat Wilson Systems Manager, Project NORTHSTAR paw@northstar.dartmouth.edu
sanders@sanders.austin.ibm.com (Tony Sanders) (05/02/91)
paw@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Pat Wilson) writes: > For the last two days I've had /etc/syslogd go nuts and start forking > copies of itself (filling up the process table along the way). I don't The only syslogd fork()'s (other than to make itself a daemon) is when it wants to do nonblocking I/O to a terminal in wallmsg(). However it sets a 30 second timeout around the write(). Send it a SIGBUS and poke through the core file and see if you can find out what tty it was trying to write to. Perhaps one of your terminals is in a funny state (doesn't explain why the alarm() isn't working nor why syslog is trying to send lots of messages, unless it's a messages saying that syslog is broken :-). Try changing your syslog.conf file to log all messages in /tmp/syslog.debug (or whatever) and see if it's sending lots of messages, perhaps the message will give you a clue where to look next. -- sanders@cactus.org I am not an IBM representative, I speak only for myself.