Let’s say that around 8pm you noticed that your linode is suffering from a lack of memory. And so you decide that the Mailman processes have gotten bloated and need to be restarted. So you do an /etc/init.d/mailman restart. And let’s further say that as you’re heading off to bed 2 hours later, you still haven’t gotten any messages from any of the mailing lists on that server.
Do you
- Assume that everybody suddenly got real quiet, and head off to bed without a second thought? or
- Assume that the restart didn’t actually restart, and send a test message to one of the list-request addresses, and when it doesn’t come back, do another mailman restart?
Because last night, I did the first one, and didn’t do the second one until this morning. Which is why on these graphs you’ll see no activity for 11 hours, and then suddenly a big spike.
Sorry, people.
In other news, today I’m wearing my Enemy Combatant t-shirt to mark the death of American democracy. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
American Democracy won’t be dead until there’s a Constitutional Amendment that obviates habeus corpus. That act is only legislation; it can be reversed, and I’m hoping that a Democratic Congress will make that a first order of business.
That’s why I hope there won’t be a Supreme Court challenge; this court is waaay too conservative, and once they’ve decided it’s constitutional, we’re in real trouble.
No, don’t take it to the court, just get Dems elected in November and next spring, hold the President’s feet to the fire.
I’m so paranoid about things like that. I don’t ever patch before I go to bed – I always start those sort of things early in the evening.
And I never patch the kernel after noon, or on a weekday.