Docker Containers in Paused state

General
1

We provide docker images for several associated sites. We don’t specify what OS, etc. they use, but most use Ubuntu. They use docker-compose to create containers, etc.

One site (out of several) is finding that all of their containers are paused - this happens sometime overnight. They sent me their crontab listing and there is nothing there that would pause the containers, and especially not all of them. They have another server that has no crontab jobs running, per them, and the same thing happens. Overnight all of their containers enter the paused state. They said these servers are not yet being backed up; I thought perhaps some backup process was pausing the containers. I believe these are some sort of virtual servers.

Docker version is 17.09.0-ce, build afdb6d4
OS:
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=“Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS”
NAME=“Ubuntu”
VERSION=“16.04.4 LTS (Xenial Xerus)”
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME=“Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS”

Has anyone experienced this or have any idea what would cause this to happen? I’d understand more if the containers were stopped - i would think that could be due to a resource problem. But these are paused.

2

run docker events --since 24h should show you all the events in the last 24 hours and what command paused the containers

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reminder to use the docker events.

In case this happens to anyone else (containers pausing with no known script/cause):
The customer discovered there was an errant process running that would download an image, spin up a container and then apparently pause other containers to do it’s thing, then stop itself and delete itself. The customer is removing the server (it’s virtual) and starting from scratch.

It may have been related to this: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/17-backdoored-docker-images-removed-from-docker-hub/