[ale] load issue

[Howard A Story]

David Corbin wrote:

>On Wednesday 21 June 2006 07:49 pm, David Corbin wrote:
>  
>
>>I have box that is getting "loads" in the 4-5 range, but when I run top,
>>it's 97.5% idle, and there are not 5 jobs that list a %CPU > 0.0.
>>
>>When I login to the box, it's very responsive.  But, when I ssh to it, I
>>never get any response.  It doesn't fail, just hangs.
>>
>>This box is inside my firewall, so while it's possibly that it's been
>>hacked, I think it "not likely" (and I certainly hope it hasn't been).
>>    
>>
>
>Update:
>
>In addition to ssh not working, it doesn't seem to respond well to DNS queries 
>(which it normally does).  But, networking in general seems to be working.
>
>I rebooted the system, and with an hour LA had hit 4 again.  This system 
>really doesn't do anything, so theres just no reason for it's LA (1, 5, 15) 
>to be 4, though it didn't seem to jump 4 right after boot, but crept up.
>
>More ideas?
>David
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>  
>
This really smells of a reverse DNS problem.  But other things don't add 
up.  Wonder if there is a service that is trying to do reverse look ups. 
SAMBA/WEBSERVER/WINS request.....etc You didn't edit the /etc/host file 
wrong did you?   What about /etc/resolv.conf?  I think SSHD will do 
reverse lookups also.  there shoudl be a setting in sshd.conf if  it does.

Under the Nooob subject.   I installed Mandrake a long time ago.  It 
install port sentery, if I remember the name correctly.   The system 
would be find for a few hours..  Then all the windows machine would stop 
talking to it and since it was the internet gateway,  I would loose 
that.   Turns out PS would  go crazy everytime one of the M$ machines 
would try to force a Master Browser election on the network.

Depending on the distro you can stop some of the services one at a time 
until you find it.  There are scripts usually in /etc/r.cd/   or 
/etc/rc.d/init.d