[ale] Memory leak (hacked?)

[David Corbin]

Geoffrey wrote:
> David Corbin wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 07 April 2004 07:40, Geoffrey wrote:
>>
>>> David Corbin wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have had my public server develop a sudden memory leak.   (Honest -
>>>> it is sudden - I've done nothing to that system recently).  I keep
>>>> ending up with the following kernel message: __alloc_pages: 0-order
>>>> allocation failed (gfp=0xf0/0)  repeatedly.
>>>>
>>>> When I reboot this morning, I watch top, and sure enough, you could
>>>> see the memory steadily creeping upwards.  This happens even when I
>>>> boot into single user mode, and have ridiculously free processes:
>>>
>>>
>>> Tried running top to see what is eating up your memory?  After starting
>>> top enter 'M' (that's uppercase m) and it will sort by memory usage.
>>> You should be able to identify the memory hog.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, I did, but I don't see anything growing in an individual process. 
>> Only the total memory uses is growing.
> 
> 
> That doesn't sound good.  Seems like something's being hidden from you. 
>  Possibly been hacked?
> 
The other possibility that occurred to me, is that it might be a kernel 
bug of some type, which might explain the memory consumption not being 
assigned to a process.

>>
>> I have noticed some "Spurious 8259A Interrupt IRQ 7" messages showing 
>> up on the console.
> 
> 
> I don't see that this could have anything to do with the memory issue.

Unless it's somehow related to my comment above, but it's not so common 
that I think it's the cause of the memory leak.


> 
>