Okay that was an ugly weekend. On Saturday morning I came to realize that our master mysql database server (mork) had crashed. I was the only one available at the time so I came up to the lab and rebooted the thing. We really need to improve our remote kvm/power cycle situation. I babysat the reboot long enough to see that mysql was recovering, knowing though that the replica would be out of sync (and need to be regenerated from scratch during the next weekly backup).
But then everything else crashed, and also hard enough to require human intervention. This time Eric eventually came up on Sunday to try to reboot a series of servers, but to no avail - they kept locking up shortly after reboot.
So Monday morning (today) we came into the lab and started cleaning up the server situation. Eric finally found the cause of the latter, if not all, of our problems. We have a pseudo user account is the "user" that runs a lot of stuff, apache processes, cron jobs, some of the BOINC back end servers, etc. For some reason the .history file had grown to 8GB in size, and it was full of garbage. Not sure why just yet, but that meant every time one of the above processes started, the shell tried to read in this impossibly large history file. Oops. Once Eric deleted this file all these dams broke free and we were able to safely recover all the databases/etc. throughout our long morning.
- Matt
