The Site With the Lamp

June 2, 2004

Had a server outage last night for some unknown reason. The machine that hosts this web site stopped responding for HTTP requests at around mid night. Though it pinged ok, it was dead for SSH and thus simply impossible to login to.

Then for a very short period of less than 2 minutes it started responding and a quick login and a look at /var/log/messages revealed that a particular HTTP process had eaten up all available memory. Unfortunately before apache could be restarted the the server froze up again.

I immidately contacted our ISP webquarry and as usual their response time was remarkable, the server was almost immidiately restarted. We kept a close eye on the machine for the next few hours but nothing untowards seems to have happened. It hardly looks like a denial of service attack because I am sure the attaker would have resumed their campaign after the restart. And in all honesty we are still not big enough to be attracted to DOS attackers.