The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Wed, 17 May 2006

Would the person who has named their machine samba.org...

...please knock it off.

Here are the log files back that you keep mailing to us. We don't want them.

From: Charlie Root <root@samba.org>
To: root@samba.org
Subject: samba daily run output

Removing stale files from /var/preserve:

Cleaning out old system announcements:

Removing stale files from /var/rwho:

Backup passwd and group files:

Verifying group file syntax:

Backing up mail aliases:

Disk status:
Filesystem  1K-blocks    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a   8950142 4815448 3418684    58%    /
devfs               1       1       0   100%    /dev

Last dump(s) done (Dump '>' file systems):

Network interface status:
Name    Mtu Network       Address              Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts Oerrs  Coll
rl0    1500 <Link#1>      00:e0:4c:d3:5b:a1   287510     0   172315     0     0
rl0    1500 192.168.46    samba               180153     -   108604     -     -
rl0    1500 fe80:1::2e0:4 fe80:1::2e0:4cff:        0     -        4     -     -
xl0    1500 <Link#2>      00:0a:5e:5e:b0:c5   879366     0    84475     0     0
xl0    1500 192.168.48    192.168.48.1        262205     -    20446     -     -
xl0    1500 fe80:2::20a:5 fe80:2::20a:5eff:        0     -        4     -     -
vr0*   1500 <Link#3>      00:14:2a:94:6a:30        0     0        0     0     0
plip0  1500 <Link#4>                               0     0        0     0     0
lo0   16384 <Link#5>                            7528     0     7528     0     0
lo0   16384 your-net      localhost.org         7528     -     7528     -     -
lo0   16384 localhost.org ::1                      0     -        0     -     -
lo0   16384 fe80:5::1     fe80:5::1                0     -        0     -     -

Local system status:
 3:01AM  up 2 days,  7:05, 0 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00

Mail in local queue:
                /var/spool/mqueue (2 requests)
-----Q-ID----- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- ------------Sender/Recipient
                 (reply: read error from dp.samba.org.)
                                         <operator@samba.org>
k3J30ZNp012363*      88 Wed Apr 19 03:00 <operator@samba.org>
                                         <operator@samba.org>
                Total requests: 2

Mail in submit queue:
/var/spool/clientmqueue is empty
                Total requests: 0

Security check:
    (output mailed separately)

Checking for denied zone transfers (AXFR and IXFR):

-- End of daily output --

On Dodgy Log Messages

logcheck is cool. A stray SMART error message in /var/log/messages suggested that a disk in the RAID array on samba.org was going to fail. Turns out that the RAID controller was not fully supported under Linux when the machine was installed, so RAID status info was not being logged and one of the disks had completely failed a number of months ago. Thanks to efforts by tridge we had a new disk up and running within a short period of time.

This has spurred me to continue tweaking my logcheck filters in case something like this happens again. It's very easy to visually filter (i.e completely ignore) a large number of messages and miss out on the important stuff so I've been researching each unfiltered message that appears and either doing something about it, or creating filter so I don't see it in the future.

According to this mailing list posting, the log message:

May 17 00:46:12 dp spamd[656]: prefork: select returned error on server filehandle:  

is perfectly normal and occurs every time a spamd child processes 200 messages. Unfortunately this message implies something has gone wrong when really everything is OK. Why does it appear in the log file then? Grr.