Perl activity

[roeiboot]

i also posted this in the Linux server forum but i won't hurt (i guess) to also post this here: on my RedHat 9 web server i encounter the following problem (the machine ran fine for at least 2-3 years now) there is weird activity (hard disk led keeps flashing) looking with the System Monitor i see it's Perl, and slowly but surely the amount of memory used increases until the machine freezes. looking with top -c and ps www -ef does not really shows me anything suspicious.

i might be hacked i really don't know.. and i have not enough knowledge to figure out what the heck is going on.

all input/helpful tips are appreciated!
thanks in advance.

 

[Kozusnik]

Sounds like a perl script may be stuck in a loop. Can you post the results for "ps -eaf |grep perl".

Also while in top, do a shift+M to sort by memory. Do you see anything?

How much physical memory do you have and what is the size of your swap?

Mark

 

[roeiboot]

this is the output:


> ps -eaf |grep perl
root 2954 1 0 20:36 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/perl /usr/libexec/webmi
root 3086 3083 0 20:47 ? 00:00:00 sh -c (ps -eaf |grep perl) 2>&1
root 3087 3086 0 20:47 ? 00:00:00 sh -c (ps -eaf |grep perl) 2>&1
root 3089 3087 0 20:47 ? 00:00:00 grep perl


i do have to add that the hard disk led is not flashing (yet..) dunno, could i be so lucky that the 'issue' resolved itself :}

 

[roeiboot]

damn, it didn't solve itself... apparently it takes a while after a reboot before the issue comes up, at this moment all i see on the Linux server is "Out of Memory: Killed process XXXX (httpd)." (where XXXX is a number).. computer responds to keyboard but whatever i type nothing happens.

very very annoying to say the least.

 

[PaulTEG]

take a look at your crontab to see what processes are scheduled ...

Paul
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