Linux server running Ubuntu 6.06 freezing after a week or so
 

This is the oddest problem I've ever come across, and I thought that perhaps the people here might know what to do. I recently set up a file server running Linux, and it works perfectly except for one odd flaw; it gradually slows down until after about a week it takes forever to do even simple things like transfer files on and off the server. It can't even reboot; I have to manually turn it off and on. After that, however, it works fine for another week, give or take. It's a pretty powerful machine, too; 2.2 GHz P4 with 1.5GB of RAM. Should be more than enough to handle simple file transfers and 2-3 users on at any given time. I thought it might be a hardware problem, but hardware diagnostics came back clean and another machine with the same specs runs Linux perfectly. The problem is that I have no idea where to begin diagnosing such a problem; what logs should I look at(I'm going to look at the syslogs tomorrow, but I don't know what to do past that)? Are there monitoring programs that can help me (I.E. can I have top put out a log every now and then to see what sort of stress the machine is being put under)? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

look in logs:

/var/log/auth.log
/var/log/syslog
/var/log/messages

netstat -an (to check for H4x0r$)
top

What services do you have on this computer besides just file sharing? What are you using to file share? Samba? NFS?

You are right in that your machine is messed up. I run a SAMBA file server with printing and SSH on a Pentium 3, 256MB RAM computer with over 20+ users. It's stable like a rock!

I can check what services are running besides Samba; off the top of my head, I know I'm using winbind. I'll try all those things when I get in tomorrow, as well as get you the output of the log files. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out what's going wrong with it.

Well, I got to the logs and I don't see anything out of the ordinary anywhere. It does try to use postfix/sendmail, which is odd since I don't have them installed on the machine, but other than that I don't see anything weird with the logs. I've reposted them here for anyone's perusal pleasure.

syslog:
authlog: (only a snippet, this sequence is more or less the same throughout the whole logs with no discernible deviations)

Maybe hardware related issue but its hard to be sure. I would try backing up any important data and reformat reinstall the system. This def is a strange problem. My laptop does this from time to time as well where you just get a hard lock and all you can do is reboot. It only occurred once and I suspect that it was heat related and the bios was just trying to protect the system from an overheat. That might be what is going on you could create a temp script that emails you or creates a log with all of the temp reading and hope that you get one before it locks up.

Yeah, I'm going to try reformatting and reinstalling. I hope it's not a hardware related problem.