We have been running a Linux machine that has been for months but powered off for about a week. When we powered it back on we get longevity on the order of 12 hours before the machine simply freezes. We see the classic:
1. Machine is completely locked up and unusable.
2. Num Lock / Caps Lock / Scroll Lock keys lit
3. Nothing of note is in /var/log.
It looks to me like a hardware problem, does anyone know of any reliability utilities to further diagnose this problems or better yet how to correct the problem?
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As previously stated the logs are very un-informative.
/var/log/messages simply has:
Mar 18 04:02:01 ddcs5 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Mar 18 14:37:31 ddcs5 pam_rhosts_auth[1563]: denied to bkuiper@192.168.11.116 as bkuiper: access not allowed
Mar 18 14:37:40 ddcs5 login(pam_unix)[1571]: session opened for user bkuiper by (uid=0)
Mar 18 14:37:40 ddcs5 login -- bkuiper[1571]: LOGIN ON pts/0 BY bkuiper FROM 192.168.11.116
Would any other logs be more informative?
With a completely random lockup I would agree that it looks like a hardware issue. The 3 main culprits would be ram, cpu and power supply. You can check the ram with the free program memtest - you can get it here - http://hcidesign.com/windo
You can check your power supply by going into the bios and looking at the "pc health" section.
You can check the cpu by either putting a different cpu in your own pc or putting your cpu in another pc.
Hi,
You might want to download Ultimate Boot CD
http://ubcd.sourceforge.ne
There are a lot of diagnotics softwares/tools can help to diagnotics your system, memory test, CPU test, disk test....
Wesly
To duplicate my answer to someone else having a simular problem...
One thing I normally do with machines to help diagnose crashing problems is to leave a ssh shell window open (using putty) running top as (top -cd 1). When the server crashes then you can go back to that window and see if you have a load or out of memory/swap issue that may be causing this issue. The bad thing is most of the time when linux based machines crash they are still pingable however all other processes and services stop responding. Now if the server crashes and you still have plenty of server resources available then more than likely a kernel panic and/or a hardware problem. If this is the case I would suggest having someone hook up a console to the machine prior to rebooting it and report any errors or output from the screen. This is usually fairly helpful in tracking down issues such as these. You see sometimes the system will output to the screen however is unable to write to the logs which is why logs show up clean. If you have a kernel panic it could still be a very good indicator that you may have a hardware issue as well depending of what it shows. For kernel panics depending on the error, I would try to upgrade your kernel and see if that helps. Now if the logs are clear and the screen is clear then more than likely you do have a hardware problem. Now as with memtest, it is good however even if memory passes the test, it could still be bad. I have ran into this a few times in the past. Hope this helps as these things are a real pain in tracking down.
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by: gtkfreakPosted on 2005-03-19 at 09:24:34ID: 13582593
What does the log say? You can see the log at /var/log/messages. You can check the last message before the machine froze, and post it here.