On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 03:56:48PM +0100, Gaby Vanhegan wrote:
> I have a machine that is running 4.3 bsd.mp, MySQL and one single site
> of PHP scripts which keep crashing. The frustrating thing is that it
> doesn't panic the kernel so I can't get any DDB output, the machine
> just locks up. Looking at it over the KVM it just shows the login
> prompt with the cursor flashing but not responding.
>
> Where do I go from here? How can I debug a problem that has no
> symptoms other than the system silently locking up? I'd love to
> provide more information but there's nothing to give.
>
> We've swapped out the entire machine, tried the UP and MP kernels but
> no joy. The plan is to upgrade it to 4.5 and see if the problems
> persist. Failing that we're looking at a clean install on a brand new
> machine but I'd like to avoid that if possible. Any suggestions about
> how I can try and figure out what's killing it?
You might want to log console output for a while, if that is possible,
and hope the problem occurs. Otherwise, I'd blame hardware failure, but
it seems somewhat unlikely that two unrelated machines both have
hardware issues.
One stupid question: is the KVM the system console (i.e. does it show
the boot messages)? ddb will *only* run on the system console, so if the
KVM is some serial port and you haven't 'set tty com0' or something
similar in /etc/boot.conf...
After all, one possible reason for a panic is lack of memory, which may
be possible on a web server.
Joachim
