[K12OSN] odd reboot issue

[Calvin Park]

Calvin,

I've removed the lines from grub.conf already, but thanks.

I knew it was just a standard "hi, how are you?" from the terminal, but I
wasn't sure if that had ever been known to cause a problem. I'm guessing it
was just the last one before the crash, it was just a bit odd that it was
the lsat one at both 5PM and 3AM that marked before it crashed.

It could be a hardware issue. I doubt it's related to cron since I have
nothing running at 5PM, and it crashed a couple weeks ago (when this thread
was started) around 9:25PM. It was running fine then until yesterday when it
crashed again (5:53PM) and then again last night at 3:53AM. So, anyway I'm
not sure that it's cron or a hardware issue. I'm really just confused.

I don't really want to ignore it until it becomes unstable without X, but
I'm kindda stumped as to how to proceed. I'm going to go through some of the
other logs in /var/log (aside from just messages), just to double check that
a specific program is not crashing it. Thanks again.

-Calvin

-----Original Message-----
From: k12osn-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:k12osn-bounces at redhat.com]On
Behalf Of Calvin Dodge
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 2:57 PM
To: Support list for opensource software in schools.
Subject: Re: [K12OSN] odd reboot issue


On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 08:48:31AM -0400, Calvin Park wrote:
>
> Thanks for the advice. I turned off X on the server, rebooted, and it
locked
> in the rhgb, I editted /etc/sysconfig/init and turned off the graphical
boot
> option. Rebooted, and it booted in fine. Terminals are working, and the
> server is running, no out of control X process. So, one problem solved.

You can also remove "rhgb" from any "kernel" lines in /etc/grub.conf.

Or ... you can permanently turn it off with "rpm -e rhgb".

> Now, I'm not sure if that is just coincidence or not. I may go through
some
> old logs and see if that was the last message before the crash several
weeks
> ago. If it is...is it possible for a terminal to cause the server to
crash?

Hmmm ... that's just the terminal shouting "I'm alive!" to the server.

I doubt it's causing the crash.

It's _possible_ for someone using the terminal to cause a system crash, or
at least use enough resources to make it non-responsive (which is why
K12LTSP
4.4.1 includes "/etc/sysconfig/k12ltsp-limits"), but it's not likely someone
was in the building at 4 a.m.

> Maybe it was related to X running on the server and such? If that's the
case
> it shouldn't be an issue anymore, but what if it was related to something
> else? Just throwing some things out there. Thanks everyone for all your
help
> already. Oh, and BTW, I checked the HDD and it still has ~40GB free.

Do you have any other terminals which are calling "MARK" between *:53 and
*:00?

Could it be that the terminal was merely the last one to do the "MARK" bit
before
the top of the hour?

I ask this because crashes around 4 a.m. make me suspect the hardware.

Why?

Because 4:02 a.m. is the default time for daily cron jobs on Red Hat/Fedora
systems
 (4:22 for weekly, 4:42 for monthly).  If your server is set up to do an
"updatedb"
every day, then the hard drive subsystem will be heavily stressed at that
time.

(that's how we identified the hangup problem on an LTSP server - and the
proof came
after we replaced the "RocketRaid" card with a 3ware (no more lockups)).

Of course, my theory doesn't account for the lockup after 5:53 a.m.  Ummm
... do you
have any cron jobs running around 6 a.m.?

Or do you just want to ignore the above until the system proves unstable
while NOT
running X?

Calvin
--
Calvin Dodge
Certified Linux Bigot (tm)
http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net

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