Bind Process Randomly Shuts Down

[vetch101]

Hi all,

I take it back... It may not have been an issue with the hosting company, as they claim to have resolved their issue, but the problem is remaining.

Also, it isn't just the bind process...

It turns out that of about 70 processes running, about 59 shutdown, leaving just 11 running...

top - 15:10:06 up 39 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
Tasks: 12 total, 1 running, 11 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.1%us, 0.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 393216k total, 27576k used, 365640k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1 root 15 0 1948 660 564 S 0 0.2 0:01.92 init
3899 root 16 0 1628 588 472 S 0 0.1 0:00.31 syslogd
4035 mysql 15 0 140m 18m 5232 S 0 4.8 0:01.15 mysqld
5186 root 25 0 1752 572 480 S 0 0.1 0:00.00 inetd
5305 root 15 0 5024 1072 768 S 0 0.3 0:00.00 sshd
5322 root 17 0 2404 772 636 S 0 0.2 0:00.00 xinetd
5403 root 19 0 2204 720 568 S 0 0.2 0:00.00 cron
7569 root 15 0 7708 2320 1892 S 0 0.6 0:00.01 sshd
7857 user 18 0 7708 1624 1184 S 0 0.4 0:00.00 sshd
7858 user 15 0 3292 1844 1204 S 0 0.5 0:00.00 sh
7863 user 15 0 2228 988 780 R 0 0.3 0:00.00 top
32141 bind 24 0 90056 3636 2072 S 0 0.9 0:00.05 named

I then reboot the server and all is well for a while...
... and then it happens again.

I've identified (by looking at the logs) that it happens on the hour, or on the half hour, although it seems that a random length of time can occur between failures - though at the moment, it is around 3 a day!

I've been running top in a putty window, watching the server as it goes along, but strangely, putty silently fails when it goes down, rather than throwing an error about the server closing the connection.

When watching it beforehand, I've noticed that on the hour/half hour, some ispcp- tasks run, as do some "diff" processes (which I figure are part of the ispcp task), and then the putty window disappears.

I log back in, and all the services are dead.

Anyone have any idea?

Cheers,

Jx