josePhoenix's questions

I recently installed CentOS 7.7 with KDE on a machine with both onboard graphics and an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti. I got the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed, but it was quite difficult as I couldn't see what was happening during boot up past a certain point.

I changed the default /etc/default/grub to remove rhgb quiet from the command line, and I'd get text output up until a message like "dracut pre-udev hook" (though it wasn't always the same step). Then I'd get no further updates, just the same unchanging text, until the X server started.

I tried plymouth-set-default-theme details; dracut -f based on a CentOS forum post. It made no detectable difference. I restored rhgb quiet thinking maybe plymouth-set-default-theme wanted those options, and now I only see the very first line of bootup ([0.00000] something about TSC), static, until X starts.

Of course, it "works" now, but I'm hoping I can make it work better. Does anyone know how to get detailed boot output over NVIDIA GPUs with CentOS?

I have a system where each user (about 20) gets their own instance of nginx and their own small pool of PHP5-FPM processes. A front-end nginx instance proxies requests to the appropriate nginx instance, which then either sends it to PHP5-FPM or serves it itself.

The strange thing is that every so often (once a couple of months ago, once today at 6:30 AM) the pools all exit without writing anything to the php5-fpm.log file they're configured to write to. (The front-end then starts returning 502 errors because it can't get the request to the PHP workers.)

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 and PHP 5.3.6, with one change from the default package: I have changed the syntax for the cron job to clean up old sessions based on this answer on ServerFault. The new syntax is:

09,39 *     * * *     root   [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -amin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -delete

I've checked syslog around that time, and the only activity around that time is cron logging a command at 6:25 AM:

Feb 10 06:25:01 peninsula CRON[31060]: (root) CMD (test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily ))

I don't see anything in /etc/cron.daily/ that looks like it would have any effect on PHP5-FPM:

$ ls /etc/cron.daily/
apport  apt  aptitude  bsdmainutils  dpkg  logrotate  man-db  mlocate  passwd  popularity-contest  standard

Anyone experienced something similar? Anyone have suggestions of where I should look next?

I recently noticed when I logged in that I had several thousand processes marked "zombie". Upon further investigation, I found the following from ps fax:

  701 ?        Ss     0:28 cron
 3363 ?        S      0:00  \_ CRON
 3364 ?        Ss     0:00      \_ /bin/sh -c   [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete
 3371 ?        S      0:00          \_ find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +24 ! -execdir fuser -s {} ; -delete
 3451 ?        S      0:02              \_ fuser -s ./sess_jns5af2mvm81e2fg1rbuctlt54
 3452 ?        Z      0:00                  \_ [fuser] <defunct>
 3453 ?        Z      0:00                  \_ [fuser] <defunct>
 3454 ?        Z      0:00                  \_ [fuser] <defunct>

... many, many lines omitted ...

13642 ?        Z      0:00                  \_ [fuser] <defunct>

As far as I can tell, this is a script in /etc/cron.d/php that is supposed to clean up dead PHP sessions at 10 and 40 minutes past the hour.

Edit: Here's the text of the script. It's installed by default with PHP on Ubuntu.

# /etc/cron.d/php5: crontab fragment for php5
#  This purges session files older than X, where X is defined in seconds
#  as the largest value of session.gc_maxlifetime from all your php.ini
#  files, or 24 minutes if not defined.  See /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime

# Look for and purge old sessions every 30 minutes
09,39 *     * * *     root   [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete

For some reason (currently I'm guessing a badly behaved web crawler making a new session on each request, but I'm still looking over the logs), sometimes there are many thousands of abandoned php sessions in /var/lib/php/, and when this script runs it will happily spawn a new fuser process for each one. This quickly hits the process limit, and brings things to a crawl.

What can I do, besides just deleting this cron job and cleaning things up things manually?

I am working on a project to create a few extremely stripped down interfaces for common Web/Internet tasks in order to make computers accessible to my visually impaired grandmother. Currently she uses Mac OS X Mail.app, but I had the idea that I could re-skin a webmail interface running on my own server to make it easier for her to use.

The ideal webmail interface to use as a starting point would be without frames or AJAX and written in Python, Perl, or PHP5+, though any setup could work as long as the template and stylesheet files were separate from the application itself.

This frontend must also connect to a remote IMAP server, since her email account is with her ISP and not on my server.

Can anyone recommend a bare-bones, no-nonsense webmail interface that would work for this?