Re: Stability

[George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com>]

On Wed, 12 May 1999, Robert Norris wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> I will shortly be taking a two week vacation, and sadly, I have to leave my
> trusty box behind *schniff* .. It has to stay running, however, because a
> local user group relies on it for mail and web serving. There is no one else
> who will have access to the machine, so I need to ensure that it will stay
> up no matter what. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I should tweak the
> system to make sure it behaves? I have the obligatory UPS, and on the event
> of a kernel panic, it'll reboot itself after a ten second delay, but is
> there anything else?
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing any ideas you may have.
> 

Depending on the weather in your location, you might leave the thermostat
set so that the room with the computer does not get too hot.

If you have some portal email account (hotmail, yahoo, etc) set your
system to notify it by email when it boots. Also, install mon and have it
watch any key processes and disk usage. You might be able to script that
without mon.

You can always check your email at a cybercafe or public library. Not that
it is going to make much difference, but you might be able to prune a
filesystem before it fills the whole disk.

I think Debian now has an SMS messaging package so if you have a cellular
phone capable of receiving text messages, you can have the system let you
know if there is an impending problem.

Make sure all filesystems are pruned of fluff.

Think of any regular maintenance activity you normally do (killing of
stale processes, etc) and try to script it for cron.

Set the immutable bit on your binaries. This is not going to
STOP a cracker but it might make life difficult for a script kiddie.