Flynn wrote:

Amdump sometimes goes crazy apparently eating up all the machine resources
and I can't get any access to anything when this happens, because I think
it's lost managing memory swap pages or something.

I think the responsible is one of the "dumper" process
(I caught it and killed it once before it was too late).

The disk activity is maximum, I can't get a prompt, I can't
get acces through telnet or ssh but the machine still pings.

I faced this situation on my first setup, I changed the complete machine
(for another reason : I don't even have a tape drive anymore,
I now use a 1.2TB raid5 disk with a simulated tape-changer on disk)
but I still have this very same problem sometimes, say once a week.

The only way to restore control is to reset & reboot - irkkk

Did someone ever got into such a situation ?

RH9, amanda-2.4.3-4

Never seen that.  And my amanda server has only 128 Mbyte RAM, and
the loadavg sometimes goes to 12-15 (the 15-minute one!), but I
still can connect to it, run amstatus etc.

Try to gather some data while you use it (e.g. with crontab) about
load and memory use, long list of processes, etc. and hopefully
you see something just before the machines locks up.


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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