Hi all,
I'm writing this for some help in tracking down whatever is causing my machine to lock up once every day, usually in the evening between 6pm and midnight.
The hardware:
AMD K6-2 300, 256MB RAM, 40Gig ATA100 hard disk with all partitions ext3. The hardware has not altered in several months, and the computer has not been moved in an equally long period.
The software is Debian Sid. I had this problem, dist-upgraded and it still occurs. I am inside X when the crash happens, I have not tried closing X down for the day to see if it repeats. I am running kernel 2.4.17, and whilst I did have crashes in previous kernels (I jumped from .13) they were not daily.
The crash occurs at random. I am not doing anything heavy at the time nor anything common. Today's crash happened whilst scrolling a webpage in Galeon. Yesterday it occured whilst flicking tabs in XChat.
The screen freezes. Gkrellm stops updating all indicators including the time. The mouse pointer works, but does not update window focus, and the mouse buttons have no effect.
The keyboard freezes. Hitting the numlock key does not change the state of the light. Ctrl+alt+F1-4 has no effect, nor does ctrl+alt+backspace/delete. I can however use alt+sysreq+s to sync the disk, and then use the machine's reset button to perform a reboot. Works a treat when used with ext3 :).
The modem apparently continues downloading data and getting irc traffic.
I do not have other equipment with which I can log in to this machine to attempt any form of 'rescue'.
Looking at /var/log/kernel.log I see nothing out of the ordinary. It shows nothing, then the disk sync, then the reboot.
So I'm looking for ideas as to what to look at/for, tests to run, etc.
Any ideas? :-) Thanks.
James Green