Old NodeJS 16 being mounted repeatedly through a users virtfs
Howdy;
Over the last year I have had an issue where my server has been suddenly going down. I have been working with my server provider to find a solution and the only avenue they think they found is that something is mounting the following path: "/home/virtfs/{user}/opt/cpanel/ea-nodejs16/bin" repeatedly. They think so many are mounted that eventually the server gets confused and stalls out. However I cannot seem to figure out what is mounting this virtfs.
A bit of history about the servers going down. Suddenly on random days, haven't found a pattern, but it can be months between, the service pdns.service fails to start. Attempting to restart the service fails. The only way to bring it back is by restarting the entire server, after everything is back to normal.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this repetitive mounting or if I am barking up the wrong tree would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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Hey there! it would be good to know how many of these mount points there are - I would expect there to be one each time a user has a unique NodeJS process, but are we talking 10-20 or thousands? how many users are on the server and how busy are they. There isn't really a good way to know if this is abnormal based on the details here.
Since it's an intermittent issue I doubt I'm going to come up with anything brilliant over the Forum. Are you able to submit a ticket directly to us? Have you tried running our server status tool to get some helpful output from the server about the current state of things?
curl -s https://ssp.cpanel.net/run | sh
I'm sorry I don't have more specifics, but for something like this a ticket would likely be the best avenue for support.
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Howdy;
Looking at mtab before I restarted last, it was 8,091 instances before the server went down. All one user, and a user who has no node applications. Also each user has one instance of nodejs16/bin mounted despite only one user actually running a node application, and that is using a more updated version of nodejs22. I never installed nodejs16 and the last version I had installed before upgrading to nodejs22 was nodejs18.
The server stalling is intermittent, but the mounting of nodejs16/bin starts as soon as the server restarts and continues. I don't know if it is the cause but it is what my vps provider expects. As of writing this there are 209 instances of this mount.
Running that script gave me a bunch of warnings, only one thing may be related:
"[WARN] * /var/cpanel/jailshell-additional-mounts: contains trailing slashes! Server may become unstable. See FB-71613"Looking at that file I find:
"/opt/cpanel/ea-nodejs16/bin/"No idea why that is there or if it is what is causing the issue.
If this is a dead end I would be glad to open a ticket.
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Howdy;
So, removing that line from jailshell-additional-mounts seems to have stopped the mounting of nodejs16 for all users, especially the one having multiple mounts.
My question now is: how did it get added, and why was it constantly making new mounts for one user?
Thanks for letting me know about that script.
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I would definitely open a ticket on this as it sounds like a potential security issue on that machine - even the busiest of systems shouldn't have anywhere near that number of processes running.
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Seems I am unable to open tickets with you guys directly anymore and it tells me to contact my host provider... I will reach out to them again with your concern and hopefully they can help. Didn't know direct support was removed at some point...
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This change happened late last year, where direct support is only available to direct license holders. You can still contact your hosting provider for support and then they escalate the issue to us if necessary.
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