port sentry

[Potato]

My server keeps dieing, everyday it goes down from this and idk how to stop it or whats causing it. here is my var/log/messages for when it went down and when i rebooted it

Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3232]: adminalert: Psionic PortSentry 1.1 is starting.
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3233]: adminalert: Going into listen mode on TCP port: 1
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3233]: adminalert: Going into listen mode on TCP port: 111
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3233]: adminalert: PortSentry is now active and listening.
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3234]: adminalert: Psionic PortSentry 1.1 is starting.
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3235]: adminalert: ERROR: No UDP ports supplied in config file. Aborting
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3235]: adminalert: ERROR: could not go into PortSentry mode. Shutting down.
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3235]: securityalert: Psionic PortSentry is shutting down
Mar  4 19:34:43 xj1 portsentry[3235]: adminalert: Psionic PortSentry is shutting down
Mar  4 21:35:28 xj1 smartd[3275]: smartd version 5.38 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Mar  4 21:35:31 xj1 smartd[3275]: Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

[Potato]

Bump........ Anyone know how to fix this?

[shads]

Have you installed something from smartmontools

[Potato]

No I haven't

[Spiral]

I do not believe that your server going down has anything to do with portsentry even in the slightest and what you just quoted is where portsentry attempts to load itself after server reboot and then is failing and shutting down again (portsentry -- not the server itself) because you don't have any ports setup to be monitored in your portsentry.conf file.

Portsentry is basically a hacker trap system where you can detect portscans and trigger bans if someone tries to connect to a specific port or ports (the ones you have not configured yet). By default, portsentry is not really configured to do much of anything at all and if you have not changed it's configuration, it is just simply going to turn itself off at startup.

Portsentry is not a required process and it turning itself off won't effect your server's operation any at all though it can be a valuable tool if you want to go ahead and take the time to configure it properly.

Back to your earlier mention of your "server going down all the time", you may have something wrong there regarding your server machine and I would certainly be glad to give you a hand in determining what that problem really is and what you might need to do to fix it but at this point I have substantial doubts that has anything at all to do with portsentry and is very likely something completely unrelated.

[Spiral]

As an addendum follow up note to my last post above ....

You might want to take a closer look at these files:

/var/log/dmesg
/var/log/messages.1
/var/log/boot.log
/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

These are the log files most likely to give you some information in regard to what may be bringing your system down or happening at the moment that your server fails.