News server gets loaded like anything

[Russ Allbery]

Pradiman K Pandita <pkpandita at hss.hns.com> writes:

> I have compiled inn2.0 on one of the HP machined with HP-UX 10.2.  The
> server was running perfectly alright till a month or so but suddenly
> started getting loaded up like anything.The news use creates and lot of
> defunct process which never get killed and load factor of the machine
> shoots up.The only alternative to restart the news is to reboot the
> machine a couple of times till the news server is stabilized.  The top
> does not show any such process which is loading the machine but the load
> factor shoots up.

> But when I kill all the processes belonging to user news the load
> drastically comes down.But I cannot restart the news server mannually.I
> have to reboot the machine.

It sounds to me like you're getting hit with forged newgroup and rmgroup
attacks.  That's been more and more prevelant these days, unfortunately.
The best solution is to install controlchan, which is an included option
in INN 2.2 and newer and handles these problems much better.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>