[K12OSN] Server Help! (a little desperate)

[Shawn Powers]

Wow...

Things have been going great this year, our entire district is using 
thin clients.  Here's a very brief breakdown of how things are running:

1 Server handles DNS, TFTP, DHCP, NIS
1 Server handles NFS (/home), SMB
1 Server handles LTSP (running 4.0.1, but the TFTP and DHCP are farmed 
out to the other server)

For some reason, I've had 2 major "glitches" this year.

Last week, eth0 (where clients connect) just quit responding.  The 
server appeared fine, but 10.10.10.10 was not pingable.  After a brief 
panic, I just ran ifdown eth0, and ifup eth0 -- and I've had no problems 
until today.  They started right after I left for lunch, of course.

Today, the LTSP server quit responding altogether.  When going to the 
console, I couldn't even get THAT to come up.  I power cycled the 
machine, and everything has come up just peachy -- BUT I'm very worried now.

I'm getting some "I told you so's" from the staff, who accused me that 
putting all my eggs in one basket was a bad idea, and with linux you get 
what you pay for, etc, etc, etc...

My question?  Where do I start looking for some problems?  I've read 
just about every bit of text in /var/log -- and nothing looks fishy.  At 
13:00, messages just stopped being written to /var/log/messages.  There 
were no odd entries before it stopped.

Are there other logs I should be checking?  Perhaps after school today, 
I'll take the server down and run memtest...  Especially during this 
first year, I need close to 100% uptime, and I've had bad luck so far.



-- 
Shawn Powers
Technology Director
Inland Lakes Schools
PHN: 231-238-6868 x9174
FAX: 509-356-7024
spowers at inlandlakes.org
http://techcorner.inlandlakes.org

--<Disclaimer, now required for frustrating reasons>--
The views, opinions, visions, thoughts, comments,
sarcastic whims, forecasts, poetic outbursts,
cynical wit, future plans, implementation ideas,
OS preference, curricular insight, ice cream preference,
or anything else I might infer are not the
views of Inland Lakes Schools.  Pretty much everything
I say, do, think, or imply with punctuation should be
considered my own delusions, and ignored completely.