[Labs-l] ssh problem on bastion1.pmtpa.wmflabs

[Faidon Liambotis]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 01:59:35PM +0100, Silke Meyer wrote:
> Today I am experiencing problems connecting to bastion and the
> wikidata-dev servers. Bastion closes the ssh connection every few
> seconds. It's not related to my internet connection, other ssh
> connections work alright. Hashar advised me to specify a
> ServerAliveInterval in my ssh config which did not help even I set it to
> 1 second. Until yesterday everything was okay and I did not modify my
> settings.
> Is anybody else having this problem?

This was a user's cron running off bastion every minute (don't do that)
and consuming all of the host's memory, resulting in the kernel's
out-of-memory killer killing random processes.

I've disabled this cron and killed all such processes, which should
resolve the situation.

Regards,
Faidon