Eduard Wirch's questions

We have a bunch of compute engine VMs on GCP with static external ip addresses. We observe the external ip addresses become unavailable once and then. http, ssh or ICMP connections are not accepted. Usually the fact is discovered (or may be triggered?) by a SSH connect attempt. The server is still alive. I can connect via serial console and verify that. The outbound connections from the VM still do work (we have cron jobs checking files from the internet, and they do run and complete gracefully during these outages), so this is not a VM nic problem.

After some time (roughly 10mins) the external ip becomes available again by itself.

Any ideas on how to investigate the problem root cause further?

I have openSUSE 11.3 installed. I'm using the openSUSE firewall configuration mechanism (/etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2). I have a http server application running on port 8080. I want the http service to be accessible using port 80. I created a redirect rule usign:

FW_REDIRECT="0/0,0/0,tcp,80,8080"

This works fine for every request coming from external. But it doesn't for local requests. (example: wget http://myserver/)

Is there a way how I can tell the firewall to redirect local requests addressed for 80 to port 8080? (using the SUSE firewall configuration file)

When a Sun Java VM crashes it usually creates a hs_err_pid* file (crash report). However we have a Open SuSE Linux server where java crashes without leaving a crash report behind. A core dump is created (SIGSEGV) but no hs_err_pid* file.

Are there circumstances where the Sun vm will not create a crash report? Or: how do I enable it.

My java version:

> java -version
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode)

ps: It is not a problem of file system access permissions. In this case the vm will create the crash report in /tmp.