From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Apr 30 02:13:27 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 151ED37B401 for ; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 02:13:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailman.zeta.org.au (mailman.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.16]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CC51143FB1 for ; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 02:13:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bde@zeta.org.au) Received: from katana.zip.com.au (katana.zip.com.au [61.8.7.246]) by mailman.zeta.org.au (8.9.3p2/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA15776; Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:12:30 +1000 Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:12:29 +1000 (EST) From: Bruce Evans X-X-Sender: bde@gamplex.bde.org To: Poul-Henning Kamp In-Reply-To: <851.1051650167@critter.freebsd.dk> Message-ID: <20030430185822.X15189@gamplex.bde.org> References: <851.1051650167@critter.freebsd.dk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: Lucky Green cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:13:27 -0000 On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > In message <20030429112849.T95090@cheesy.cypherpunks.to>, Lucky Green writes: > >One of my 5.0 test boxes is spewing these cron emails. Any idea why this > >might be? (Email addresses modified) > > /usr/libexec/save-entropy is a shell script and it pulls in /etc/rc.conf > and friends. It's probably something in there that trips it... This script is in /usr, so bad things happen if /usr is nfs-mounted and the server is down. I don't know if this is your problem, but it has the same effect of generating a lot of emails. IIRC, the main problems are that cron usually keeps running while the server is down (although cron is in /usr too, all the pages needed to run it are normally mapped) and this script is run too often (every 11 minutes). So if the server is down for (11 * N) minutes, cron forks N times and each child waits for /usr/libexec/save-entry to become accessible. Then when the server comes back up, a herd of N save-entropy's run. save-entropy is a simple shell script that has no locking, so the herd makes a mess of rotating the entropy files and sends mails about this. Bruce