"almost" a server crash: syslog & keventd involved

[Silviu Marin-Caea <silviu@genesys.ro>]

This morning I found the mail server (SuSE 8 all updates) in a weird 
state.  Mail wasn't working, DNS wasn't working, couldn't ssh into it. 
Luckily, I had a console open from yesterday and was able to ps -Al.

Here's what I've got:

http://www.genesys.ro/ps-l
After killing the cron and pop3
http://www.genesys.ro/ps-f

Also, load average was 2.

Notice the syslogd line in "ps -l", when in weird state

006 D     0   519     1  0  80   0 -   352 flush_ ?        00:03:46 syslogd
Same with ps -f:
root       519  0.0  0.0  1408  312 ?        D    Jul15   3:46 /sbin/syslogd

and in normal state

006 S     0   523     1  0  80   0 -   352 do_sel ?        00:00:01 syslogd

man ps says
PROCESS STATE CODES
        D   uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)

There is this too:
007 Z     0     2     1  0  80   0 -     0 do_exi ?        00:00:00 
keventd <defunct>
with ps -f
root         2  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        Z    Jul15   0:00 [keventd 
<defunct>]

Couldn't get it out of the weirdness without a reboot (ugh).  Now, after 
the crisis, I think that maybe I should've restarted syslog.  And, 
besides, the deep magic of keventd is beyond me, just yet.

Considering that daily cronjobs run at 0:15, I think the problem was 
there.  This is the last file in /var/log: "Wed Aug 07 00:17:21 2002 
mail-20020807.gz" and this is the last message in /var/log/messages "Aug 
  7 00:17:06 mail named[24944]: lame server"

The conclusion is that syslogd restart after running daily jobs did not 
go well.  What could have caused this?  And what about keventd?

I was planning on going on vacation knowing that I have a reliable linux 
server (it's been running for a couple of months).  Now there is doubt :-(

-- 
Silviu Marin-Caea   Systems Engineer Linux/Unix   http://www.genesys.ro
Phone +40723-267961