Sep 4, 14:34
My server is currently down and has been since yesterday morning. I’m drafting this entry offline so as to publish it when it comes back up.
So why is it down? It seems I hit some operating system limit of the memory amount that can be shared between a process and its children. The server stopped reacting and I couldn’t even login at the console when I got back home. After rebooting it, I proceeded with the task that I was doing that morning when it first started misbehaving, compiling OpenSSL. I don’t think this is the culprit, but maybe it interacted badly with apache (the real memory hog in this box) and took it down. The thing is, I left it recompiling and this morning I didn’t check out the result before leaving. If I had, I’d have seen the machine was hung again, and would not find myself unable to reboot it remotely. That makes it 2 days offline, and it feels already as if I had fallen from the web :( That’s one of the downsides to be self-hosted. You cannot walk to the server if you aren’t home in the first place.