Yesterday, just as I was leaving work, someone killed inetd on the Dynix server. (I won't tell you who did it, but it wasn't me. I don't even have that kind of access.) Apparently this has happened before, and it's not exactly a catastrophe, in that it's a fixable problem that doesn't destroy anything. It just means that no one can make new connections to the server.
For those of you who don't know, inetd is a sort of master net daemon (program) which listens for connections on certain ports and launches other programs in response to connection requests. Without inetd running, no one can connect to the server via ssh or telnet, which is kind of a problem. Unfortunately, due to a limitation of the Solaris version that we're running, we can't just restart inetd; the whole server has to reboot.
So at 3pm, ITS went into emergency-response mode. Emails and phone calls went out, the server rebooted about 15 minutes later, and a few minutes after that everything was back to normal. Just a little flurry of excitement.
Post a comment