Problems w/Firewall

[rtgwbmsr]

I have an interesting problem, and since networking isn't my forte, I need help. Here's my problem:

Where I work, we have a UNIX based Novell firewall appliance. A few seconds before 12:30 PM on this thing's clock, a few packets get dropped, the the thing restarts, forcing us to restart every service.

That's all we know...

Does anyone here have any clue what's going on?
Is there any way we can find that this is a hardware problem? We want to try another one to see if there is a problem with the hardware, but the assholish head of the department won't let us get anything...

THANKS FOR ANY HELP!!!

[rtgwbmsr]

I forgot to add that it only does it Monday through Friday...

[voidmain]

Since it is happening at the same time every day it sounds like you have a cron job scheduled at 12:30pm. Whatever program is being run at that time is obviously hosing your system. Now the cron job may not necessarily be running under "root" but it would be likely, or under the ID that the firewall services are running under. Don't know what flavor of Unix you are running but most *NIXes store all crontab files in a single directory so you can look at all of them without having to log in as each and every user.

Look for a directory similar to:

/var/spool/cron

The above is he directory that crontab files are stored for every user and root under Linux. There should be a file named the same as the username containing the cron entries for that user. Find one that contains a line that starts with "30 12" and you'll probably have found your culprit.

All flavors of *NIX that I have ever used do it this way, although the name of the directory may differ.

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]