Re: Weird server mystery: self-reset, mostly

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

On Monday 24 January 2011 01:47:27 will trillich wrote:
> Never seen this before -- all daemons and all user processes killed. Zap.
> It happened around 23:17 Chicago time (that's when the log-daemons quit
> logging). What would cause this?

[ ... snippage ... ]
>
> *Anybody got a clue as to what might have happened to kill all daemons and
> user-processes in one swoop? This has been a rock-solid Debian server for
> years...*
>

  One thing that can take down a lot of daemons all at once is if
the system thinks it's switching to run-level 1, or even shutting
down -- it runs all those "K"-symlinks in /etc/rcX.d. 
  
  Obviously this isn't *exactly* what happened to your system, 
since it showed 6 users from "uptime", and your ps list shows
"init[2]" (it's about 4/5 of the way down in your list), indicating
run-level 2 (I think), but it may be related.

  Also 500+ days is impressive up-time -- you are clearly not
doing kernel patches ...

				-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net