| I'll never forget this time in college when I had set up an OpenBSD router in our apartment and came home one weekend to find that I was unable to log into it via SSH. Actually, it was timing out. So I hooked up a monitor and a keyboard to this old old P1/133 with 32MB of ram that had been taken out of a dumpster to be our router to see what was going on. A few months prior to this I had been playing around with rrd and started generating traffic graphs so that I could get pretty pretty pictures of our traffic (and to figure out when one of my roommates was streaming his porn). I had set the cron jobs to run every 10 minutes. Initially the data sets were so small that this wasn't an issue, but over time the database got larger and suddenly the cron job was taking 10 minutes and 10 seconds, and then 10 minutes and 20 seconds... on and on until finally cron jobs were running over cron jobs. So after about 2 minutes waiting to get logged in, I finally get the load average for the system and it was somewhere around 146.20. After another couple of minutes, I was able to disable the cron jobs and kill off rrd graphs. In another 10 minutes, the load average was back to < .70. All this time it was passing traffic without a hiccup and I believe it had another 100+ days of uptime after this before I moved out. What a box. I miss that router. |