Greetings everyone!
When Astaro raised the free home license from 10 to 50 IP addresses I began testing it for use on my home network.
Initially I grabbed some hardware I had laying around which consisted of a Biostar motherboard and a Semperon CPU. I don't recall what model the onboard NIC is however I used a 3COM 3C905B for a second NIC. Initially I had a fair amount of problems with the system which turned out to be bad RAM. Once I thought I had the RAM problem settled out and it seemed to work well I moved the motherboard, RAM, NIC, and Hard Drive into a rack-mount case and threw it in the basement. It seemed OK for a short time (perhaps a week?) and then started to hard lock about every 24 hours. By hard lock I mean it would not respond to PING's on the WAN or LAN interface and the console itself would not accept any keyboard input. The cursor next to the login prompt was NOT blinking.
My intentions were to purchase a Jet-Way motherboard with Atom chip and a daughterboard with 4 NIC's however with the stability problems of the existing system a change was needed more quickly. I was able to obtain a new Intel board/atom combo and rebuilt the system on that hardware and loaded my config from the old system into it. I used a 512MB stick of RAM I had laying around that came from a known working system.
After the rebuild I continued to have occasional locks which I attributed to RAM (512MB) and had already ordered a new 2GB stick of memory.
This brings me to my problem. I'm still experiencing hard system locks anywhere from 24 hours to a week. I've looked in the system log to no avail as the log stops logging when it locks and then obviously begins logging again after a power cycle.
Here's the hardware that's currently running the system:
Intel D945GCLF board/atom combo
G.SKILL 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 667 (PC2 5300) F2-5300CL5S-2GBMQ
No Optical Drive (removed after install)
No FDD
IDE Hard Drive (Western Digital I believe)
Name Brand PSU - not some cheap PSU
3COM 3C905B NIC (additional)
I've since configured my managed PDU to ping the LAN interface of the Astaro box and if it becomes unresponsive for 30 minutes or more, it reboots the system.
Possible mitigating factors:
1. Nightly beginning at midnight an FTP replication is started that compares files on my network to a remote nas at a friends house and replicates any changes. I've seen the firewall become unresponsive during this but I believe that issue was resolved with the upgrade to 2GB of memory. This generally only transfers around 20MB except on rare occasions where a large volume of data changed and the backup can take a few hours. The pre-backup scan performed over the wire can be pretty intense though.
2. The SPAM Email reports are sent out at about 6:30AM
3. The executive report is generated at midnight.
4. A system that runs uTorrent 24/7 behind the firewall handling both incoming and outgoing torrents.
Services enabled as shown on the Dashboard:
Firewall
Intrusion Prevention
IM/P2P filtering
HTTP/S Proxy
SMTP Proxy
Antivirus
Antispam
Antispyware
Remote Access
Misc: I read that on previous versions there could be problems with enabling the NTP service. As a result I had turned it off. A few days ago I made a change internally that required one of my systems to get time information from an NTP source and I prefer not to have NTP traverse the firewall. I re-enabled NTP (without thinking about the problems) and the system seemed to become less stable. I disabled it again and stability improved but I'm still suffering the locks. I did notice initially (before alot of these other problems) that the NTP service seemed to cause some stability issues.
Timing: This generally seems to happen in the late night/early morning hours. Usually after I go to bed (midnightish) and I usually realize it after leaving for work (7AMish).
I'm not sure where to look at historical logs at this point and can only see to the 00:00:01. I do have log retention enabled and I've also just configured an FTP backup of the logs through the management console on Astaro to an internal FTP server.
So, not that I've provided a ton of information (but I'm sure someone will call me out for missing some crucial piece) anyone got a bright idea where to proceed? The only consistency I can see is the 3COM NIC. I have another higher grade NIC that was yanked out of the old firewall after comitting to Astaro however I have not installed it yet because I've been unable to figure out how to add / change hardware without a rebuild.
Thanks!
Matt
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