Sarge goes into a time warp (literally)

["ryan punt" <rpunt@good-sam.com>]

Hi all,

I've got a bit of a showstopper here. I'm runnind Debian Sarge on an IBM x305 (1U server chassis). Its primary function is to serve as an apt-mirror for the company; it also runs instances of apache and apache-ssl, mysql, and a few other packages. It's booting from a software mirror managed by mdadm.

I've had a huge problem with this server for the past week; over the course of about 2 days, eventually time will stop incrementing by more than 4 seconds before resetting, while load goes through the roof and the system eventually grinds to a halt.

For example, I came in this morning and found that the server was unresponsive. I logged in and ran this:

#!/bin/bash
while [ /bin/true ]; do
date
sleep 1
done

and the date output looked like this:

Thu Jan 25 15:37:41 CST 2006
Thu Jan 25 15:37:42 CST 2006
Thu Jan 25 15:37:43 CST 2006
Thu Jan 25 15:37:44 CST 2006
Thu Jan 25 15:37:45 CST 2006
Thu Jan 25 15:37:41 CST 2006

This continued repeatedly. Some time yesterday and internal clock just up and decided to stop counting?!?

I've tried this with and without ntpd running * same result.

As per the norm, I checked top and found no processes using more than .3% CPU. 468/512MB RAM in use; no swapping. The current load had spiked from .03 to 2.5 in the course of about 5 minutes.

The server is current and stock on everything but the latest security release for the kernel; I've been holding the kernal back but am strongly considering upgrading.

Anyone have any ideas? How about a better place than "top" to check for rogue processes?

Thanks,
Ryan

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