My Linux box locked up on me this morning. Running the stock Debian 2.1/Linux 2.0.36 kernel... and only two services, telnet (from xinetd) and SSHD1 (current version).
It runs all the time over a dial-up PPP connection... but I couldn't log into it when I got to work this morning; I figured maybe the connection was lost for whatever reason (ISP, or whatever)... and the line was busy (I tried calling it to see if the line was open). Later during the day I tried again and it rang, which added to the confusion. Anyway I get home and it's locked up solid on me. Blank screen... couldn't ping it over the LAN, etc.. I looked at the logs (the ones I know about anyway) and couldn't find any indication of any failure. I checked auth.log, daemon.log (written by the SSHD1), debug, kern.log, last, messages, ppp.log, pppupd.log, and syslog... all in the /var/log/ directory. I HAVE been able (by reading my PPP logs) to pinpoint the time of the failure to somewhere between 9:58:10 and 9:58:40... sometime inside of those 30 SECONDS, something happened. Can you guys tell me what other logs I should look at to look for core dumps, evidence of hardware failures, etc.? This is my first lock-up so I would like to know how to track this down. BTW when I left for work this morning, I left one login open from the console... running GNOME, Window Manager, lICQ, and of course XFree86. Could a mem leak cause something like this? (They were not running under my root account, but as a regular user.) Thanks. :-\ - Jim
