I've tried to query all of you gurus before regarding various hangs on my system, but as far as I can tell, nobody has replied to my question. So, I'll give it a go again. I've read everything on the mailing list that was written in the last three months about system hangs and freezes with both 8.1 and 8.2, but none have addressed the problem that I have been seeing. Most have described complete system freezes where nothing could be done besides a reboot, but what I am seeing is a bit different.
I have installed 8.2 on a Dell Precision 410 (Pentium III - 500). Everything works fine for a while, and then within a period of 24 to 72 hours, the system develops a strange disregard for any terminal / shell sessions. Interestingly, I had a similar problem with 7.2 on the same model machine, and it went away, but I have no idea what cured it. The strange thing about this is that any current terminal sessions that are in progress have no problems, and I can do any normal command-line work without problems. If I am logged into a window manager such as KDE, I also have no problem starting applications from icons as long as they do not require a shell to begin or to work properly. If I am using a shell when this anomaly occurs, and I try to su to another user, it will try to start another shell, but will hang. At first I thought that the problem might be related to something with the network. But when I am waiting for the hanging shell, I can browse the web, etc. Another interesting bit is that I can ssh into the machine, and will be given a login prompt, but as soon as ssh tries to invoke a shell, the login hangs. I am really at a loss as to what the problem might be. It seems to be related to shells acquiring a tty, but I'm not sure about that. Now that I think of it, next time this happens, if I have a terminal open, I'll try to do a strace on a new shell session to see where the hangup occurs. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated. One other thing that might be related is the fact that I've had problems shutting the system down cleanly. The entire shutdown process gets hung up when it tries to umount the /net subdirectory. I turned off amd, and so far that seems to have helped, but I only made that change yesterday, so I cannot be completely sure. I'm not sure how experienced some people on this list are with deep problems like this. The silence from the last one leaves me to believe that either nobody has a clue or that nobody is interested (because nobody else has experienced the same problem -- at least nobody has described the same problem). Either way, if I figure it out, I'll try to detail what the problem was and how to resolve it. Rob
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