Something is killing my box each evening, need help
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
Hi James I would suspect the memory for starters - Used to have some total lockups on this machine until the sims where changed.. Google for memtest and run it on your computer to see if it picks up on any memory problems. Regards, Paul. On Wednesday 09 January 2002 11:25 pm, James Green wrote:
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.
Hi James - I used to have the same problem - it is most likely a video driver issue (My graphics card is an SiS6386 AGP). I found that changing some of the card options for accelleration and onboard memory reduced it but it did reappear occasionally afterwards. Check the docs for supported options for your card and play with /etc/XF86Config. I think that somewhere X gets into an infinite low-level loop writing to the graphics card (At least the behaviour is consistent with that scenario). Check the memory settings for your card - mine was set up as 8Mb but actually only 4Mb is addressable, I think I ended up using a non-aggressive fifo setting, with no-accelleration.. things like that (didn't really affect the performance of X Apps as it goes). Since I upgraded to X4.01 it has not recurred (fingers-crossed!) RAM is also a potential source of problems (though les likely in this scenario IMHO). Corruption is possible so check the sticks first, if your sticks are found to be ok and you are using Lilo make sure that you have the correct append="MEM=<value>" line in lilo.conf for the kernel image you are booting. I Don't know how grub does this. In truth this is one of the most difficult problems I've ever had with a linux box - there's usually a good answer for most things but I'm afraid this one is a bugger. Get tweaking. Cheers Earl "Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them." Leo Tolstoy *********************************** [earl.brannigan@lindenhouse.co.uk] www.lindenhouse.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)1223 834383 (Office) +44 (0)7812 179759 (Mobile) ***********************************
-----Original Message----- From: main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk]On Behalf Of James Green Sent: Wednesday 09 January 2002 23:26 To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: [Alug] Something is killing my box each evening, need help
participants (3)
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Earl Brannigan -
James Green -
Paul