On 14 Jan, Harry Putnam wrote: > I'm experiencing a problem where during an X session the machine > inexplicably freezes up... networking along with mouse keyboard etc. > No access is then possible via ssh or any other way other than a hard > reboot. > > I've attempted to debug the problem by first searching the logs. But > not finding anything I recognize as a clue. > > I've inserted a line like this in /etc/syslog.conf > cat /etc/syslog.conf > [...] > *.* -/var/log/debug.log > [...] > > and then created a tiny script called by cron every 5 minutes that > simply pinged an external host and reported the results by way of > piping to `logger', guaranteeing it would appear in the system logs . > > Then after a freeze up and reboot, search the logs for the most recent > successful ping and see what happened after that. (The freeze up freezes > networking too so the ping would then fail). And Hopefully I'd see > something of note between the last successful ping and the reboot. > > But I see absolutely nothing of note. > > The freeze does not appear to obey any particular time frame after a > boot, only that sooner or later a freeze up will occur. > > Apparently there is nothing happening that merits a log entry. > > Its been going on for a goodly while and I've just been rebooting as > needed ... I haven't been really active on the machine for a while so > it was easy to get along with, but now I need to do more work and so > the problem is a major stumbling block. >
A few months, ago, I had similar symptoms. It turned out to be a defective AMD Phenom CPU (a very tricky error since all hardware tests passed) I guess it's a cache coherence problem (the Phenom has 4 cores). Luckily it was quite a new machine so my dealer replaced the CPU. The problem didn't occur ever since. While searching the net for a reason of failure I came accross messages about failing graphics chips / or graphics drivers. Perhaps you try an open source driver for your graphics card and see if the problem still occurs. (Before I suspected the CPU, I have tortured memory and I have even replaced the motherboard) To "exclude" a software problem, try booting from a SystemRescue-CD http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page It's Gentoo based and sports an X-Server. That are the problems that makes one crazy! Helmut. -- Helmut Jarausch Lehrstuhl fuer Numerische Mathematik RWTH - Aachen University D 52056 Aachen, Germany
