[Security] two weeks explanation

[root]

hi,

as all of you experienced in the last 2 months gate, the polarhome realm 
gateway had extremely serious problems with system stability.
System just hanged without any log, it was sometimes extremely slow and 
there were quote lot of other symptoms that I could not find any solution. 
I've spent lot of time to debug, check, enable/disable services  and at 
the end I come to conclusion that the problem could be connected with NFS 
that polarhome heavily uses during inter host communication.

I thought that might be even hacker attack or some nasty hard disk 
failure...

Finally RedHat announced that some kernel bug is responsible for this 
behaviour. 
More to read at http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2002-110.html

>From now on I will sleep better :)

... and another thing. Even if gate was in very inconsistent state I had 
to leave it alone for some (exactly 3) weeks.
One week I was on business trip (polarhome almost lost it's administrator 
in Petakh Tikvah explosion in Tel Aviv) and Later on two weeks holiday 
with family. 

I promised to my girlfriend: no laptops, no internet cafes during holiday 
(seems I spend to much time with computers). I kept my word.  But now when 
I know the reason of the problem... I see that I could not make too much 
(from Poros, Greece) even if I would have access to computer. gate was 
down, therefore rest of the system was unreachable as well.

I am terribly sorry, but I always try to point out that: polarhome is a 
non commercial (better call it hobby) association of enthusiasts that 
relay on one person, therefore polarhome users should not expect 
commercial service quality from polarhome. I and the COPS team and lot of 
others work overtime without any compensation, just to have a free and 
nice island on the internet. 

Hope that polarhome users can accept it as it is.

Regards, Z
root@polarhome.com