[Cialug] SUSE Question

[Stuart Thiessen]

I am running SUSE 9.2, I believe (Server's at the office and I'm at 
home off today). My colleague called me up and said that the server 
went down again.  It had been working for months with no problem and 
then all of a sudden, it is acting a little more temperamental.  The 
same is true for a client of ours who we helped set up something 
similar to what we have. It worked for months with no problem, and then 
all of a sudden, it is going down and then 20 days later, it is down 
again.

Any thoughts what might be the problem?  I plan to investigate the logs 
and such, but I am off today so I don't have access to them when 
they're down (obviously). I will post what the logs say when I can get 
to them tomorrow (unless I can figure it out myself).  I'm more 
concerned with the seeming indication that it is becoming unstable.

I just know enough to get things setup and configure things and keep 
them running but not enough to be an expert when things go wrong or 
need more detailed fixing.  I would like to be, but haven't gotten 
there yet. So, I thought I would check with you to see if you had 
experienced anything similar and see if you had any suggestions on 
troubleshooting tips for this kind of thing.

Both are being used as fileservers both as SFTP and Samba servers. Our 
client's is also being used as an email server and a webmail server (I 
know it is better to separate the fileserving and email functions, but 
the client doesn't have the budget to separate the two functions at 
this time).

One last question ... do you recommend that servers be restarted from 
time to time?  If so, how often do you recommend that happen?

Thanks,

Stuart