Fog server keeps going down

[Wayne Workman]

@Scott-B said:

What do the logs on the server suggest the issue could be?

Please provide some details of the server. Ubuntu? Fedora? Versions? Do the log files on the server point to anything?

@szecca1 What OS? Also, you can look at Apache Errors via CLI as well if the web interface is not working. If we know the OS, we can give you the exact command to do this (along with a lot of other logs to check too).

[szecca1]

@Wayne-Workman The OS of the fog server is Fedora Server 22

[Wayne Workman]

@szecca1 Just saw that you already said that … sorry. I’ll get some commands together to send your way.

When we have a mystery problem, we need to look in a lot of places until we find a clue.

[Wayne Workman]

@szecca1

Run these commands the next time the server goes down - grab the output, and then just restart it to keep problems in your environment to a minimum. Post what you find and we’ll go from there. If you get errors while posting the output of any of those, just upload the output in a .txt file instead.

the -n 100 is for number of lines to return - you can adjust that as needed.

Apache Error log:
tail -n 100 /var/log/httpd/error_log

MariaDB log in Fedora 22:
tail -n 100 /var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log

Also, run the top command to see what the load averages are, and what is running:
top
Sample output from my server:

top - 09:28:32 up 51 days, 20:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.11, 0.18
Tasks: 166 total,   1 running, 165 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.5 us,  0.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem :  4028388 total,    61580 free,   341508 used,  3625300 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  4063228 total,  4053892 free,     9336 used.  3621740 avail Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
30282 apache    20   0  409732  24140  13936 S   1.7  0.6   0:10.38 httpd
    9 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.3  0.0  50:57.07 rcuos/0
  672 dbus      20   0   47108   3504   3048 S   0.3  0.1   4:56.67 dbus-daemon
27066 mysql     20   0 2190100  97052  16348 S   0.3  2.4   2:06.60 mysqld
    1 root      20   0  187052   6152   3000 S   0.0  0.2   8:43.03 systemd
    2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:01.77 kthreadd
    3 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   1:12.82 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
    7 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  71:43.84 rcu_sched
    8 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcu_bh
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcuob/0
   11 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:11.47 migration/0
   12 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:29.96 watchdog/0
   13 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:28.28 watchdog/1
   14 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:14.37 migration/1
   15 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:20.91 ksoftirqd/1
   17 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/1:0H
   18 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   6:21.82 rcuos/1
   19 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcuob/1
   20 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:28.58 watchdog/2
   21 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:12.49 migration/2
   22 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   2:10.35 ksoftirqd/2
   24 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/2:0H
   25 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0  11:36.20 rcuos/2
   26 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcuob/2
   27 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:27.90 watchdog/3
   28 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:14.79 migration/3
   29 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:10.40 ksoftirqd/3
   31 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/3:0H
   32 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   5:01.15 rcuos/3
   33 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcuob/3
   34 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
   35 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs
   36 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns
   37 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 perf
   38 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 writeback
   39 root      25   5       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksmd
   40 root      39  19       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khugepaged
   41 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 crypto
   42 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kintegrityd
   43 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bioset
   44 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kblockd
   45 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ata_sff
   46 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 md
   47 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 devfreq_wq

[szecca1]

@Wayne-Workman How can I run those commands when I can’t connect to the server. Either from the virtual machine or from putty, I can’t log in to the server until after I reboot it!
And no worries, I know you guys are busy with other things. Any information you need I’ll be happy to give you several times if needed.

[Tom Elliott]

@szecca1 that is definitely information we needed. That leads me to believe either a problem with the nic that is associated. Does your server go to sleep/hibernate?

[szecca1]

@Tom-Elliott No the server doesn’t go to sleep. The other VM’s on that server are working perfectly fine. Its just FOG that seems to be having a problem. But once it is rebooted, it comes up and works fine for the day.

[Wayne Workman]

@szecca1 When I read that post below I immediately thought exactly what Tom posted - NIC issues. Maybe even switch issues.

Try a different port on the switch, maybe even try a different switch… Maybe try a different type of virtual adapter.

[szecca1]

@Wayne-Workman No other VMs attached to this device is having issues. It could be the virtual adapter but I can change that? What you guys are saying makes sense but it has to be something with the FOG machine because the others are working fine.

[szecca1]

@szecca1 We just checked to see if we could add a new driver for the ethernet card and we couldn’t. Do you recommend a certain ethernet card adapter driver for me to use? We currently have the E1000 ethernet adapter on it.

[Tom Elliott]

@szecca1 I don’t think it’s the driver. I think it’s the physical adapter.

[szecca1]

@Tom-Elliott It can’t be the physical adapter. The adapter that is being used is for several different VMs and no other VMs are having issues besides the FOG server.

[Tom Elliott]

@szecca1 could it be possible to separate the nic for the fog server? Remember fog is using the nic for many things. Separating the nic would be the first suggestion u can make. I understand the issue is only occurring on the fog service.

[szecca1]

@Tom-Elliott If I may ask, what do you mean by separating the nic?

[Tom Elliott]

@szecca1 put fog on a separate physical nic. The fact that you can change the type of the nic to another adapter type tells me your fog server is a part of a vm. This usually means the vm host has multiple physical nics available, if this is not the case the only other option I can give would be to change the driver which I doubt is going to help.

[szecca1]

@Tom-Elliott alright i will give that a look to see if thats possible.

[Wayne Workman]

@szecca1 What are you using for virtualization? If it provides an interface (like windows Hyper-v or CentOS KVM), then can you get to the fog server that way?

[george1421]

For clarity I run FOG under centos running on ESXi 5.5. I don’t have this kind of issue.

I know this was a long thread and I kind of skimmed it.

When you setup your linux server you should set the network adapter to e1000, you can use vmxnet3 if you install the vmware tools first. Its always has been a pain to do so I just use the e1000 driver. I seem to recall a bug with the e1000 driver with either the GA release of 5.0 or 5.5 that caused the virtual nic to hang under heavy load. That issue was fixed with a ESXi update. Is you ESXi server up to date with patches?

Please help me understand you say you can’t access the FOG server. I understand if you can’t access it via the network, can you log into the console directly using vmware configuration client? Or is the vmclient frozen? If you can log in from the console then I would sure check the logs in /var/logs to see if there is any indication of what happened. I would also try to restart the network services (from inside the fedora OS) to see if you can get it back online. I have see where two hosts having the same IP address will take a server off line like this.

It would be interesting to see what happens to this vm if you shutdown all FOG services at the end of the day. Is the VM still on the network in the AM?

[soapbox] While I understand the techie needs to run fedora, why are you using a desktop OS instead of a server OS? Would you load MS SQL server on Windows 7 for your enterprise application? Please pick stable rhel or centos over fedora. Yes I know it works, but why not use the right tool for the job.[/soapbox]

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 said:

why are you using a desktop OS instead of a server OS?

Fedora Server is a server OS. They have three different versions: workstation, server, and cloud.

I would also point out that Windows 7 uses the same kernel as Windows Server 2008 R2.

[george1421]

@Wayne-Workman said:

Fedora Server is a server OS. They have three different versions: workstation, server, and cloud.

I would also point out that Windows 7 uses the same kernel as Windows Server 2008 R2.

Well color me red (hat) and call me embarrassed (to a point), mea culpa.

Traditionally the fedora brand was the rapid development OS for redhat with many new/advanced functions. Some of those features would end up in rhel (centos) and some features would just disappear. With the rapid development cycles you may get a new version every few months (which is NOT what you need for a server OS). Some companies have regulations about NOT using outdated or unpatched software (including the OS). If you built your servers based on Fedora (any version of a rapid development OS) you would be in a continual update cycle just to stay current and within policy. That is why rhel, centos, ubuntu lts are all long term supported OS’. To give companies a stable and supported OS platform. Does this mean you shouldn’t use Fedora for a OS, no. A lot depends on your company’s regulations. Just because you CAN install MS SQL server on Win7, doesn’t mean you should. (If I remember MS’ Windows 7 EULA you are not allowed to use a desktop OS in a server role)