Re: red-handed: clock stops: cron related?

[hurlebau hurlebaus de]

On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 11:22:26AM -0400, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> I'd been having some odd lockups of my PC164LX machines... they'd be
> fine, and then they'd be pingable but you can't log in, and the
> console is unresponsive.
> 
> I got on one right before it crashed and netstat -to showed the timers
> weren't changing. Then later I got on aother right before it crashed,
> and realized that "date" wasn't changing. Then I made a script which
> ran date on each machine every 10 seconds. Machines that crash
> definitely have stopped clocks.
> 
> Given that I saw this under 2.0.35 and 2.2.5-16 (rh 6.0's kernel), I
> don't think it's a kernel bug. The only hardware oddity that I know of
> is that when you reboot these guys, the cmos date is always wrong. I'm
> going to replace all the batteries... could that possibly cause this
> symptom?
> 
> I haven't had this much fun with clocks since I realized that flipping
> the front-panel switch on a PDP-11 that turns off the clock breaks
> Kermit, and little else.
> 
> -- g

>Well, my 164LX machines have been locking up, too.  It happend again 
>yesterday on my desktop machine.  I was on a VC when it locked up.  I
>could still switch consoles, but couldn't type anything.  The machine
>was still pingable, but I couldn't log in remotely.  When I switched to
>VC #7 (where X was running) I couldn't change back.  This was with kernel
>2.2.12pre4.  I have since upgraded to 2.2.12pre14 and turned on the 
>magic SysReq keys.   It hasn't locked up yet...
>
>BTW, I believe that this machine's battery is ok.  I don't know if the
>clock stopped or not when it hung. 


Well, finally there seems to be somebody with the same problem then I have
for more than a year: System clock stops, no response to keyboard anymore.
Login sometimes still works for a while, and a halt sometimes prevents to
mess up the harddrive. Reboot from another machine never worked in my
case.

I called Digital and they came and changed the mainboard, because they 
expected a hardware problem. But it did not help. 

I just figured out that something is wrong with my cron jobs. About every
hour root gets an email from the system: