Hi
Due to a hanging rm process, we had to restart the server today.
After rebooting the machine, it was decided to also update the system to the latest packages version, but still staying on Debian Wheezy (for now.)
The server is using a custom kernel module provided by Realtek for its RTL8168 ethernet NIC. An in-kernel driver is available, but proved to be too unreliable, leading to frequent network outages and even machine crashes whenever the network IO load was higher than a few hundred KB/s. The hosting provider has a wiki entry for this issue at this location: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installation_des_r8168-Treibers/en
Unfortunately, the current driver version as provided by Realtek, 8.040, seems to be incompatible with the old 3.2.0-4-amd64 (3.2.68-1+deb7u2) kernel provided by Debian.
As of writing this, I do not know what happened exactly, but most likely the module caused a kernel panic during bootup.
Reverting to an older version, 8.037, fixed this issue and let the server boot up correctly again. For future maintenance work, please use this older version, at least on Debian Wheezy.
I put the module source code into /usr/src and created a symlink from /usr/src/r8168-current to /usr/src/r8168-8.037.00.
Other updated packages include Java (version 7 co-installed, the "alternatives" symlink now point to version 7 instead of 6) and Jenkins, including its plugins.
A test build run suggests the Jenkins update was successful.
Mihai