On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Richard S. Crawford wrote: > I know it's not much to go on, but when it comes to this area, that's about > the limit of my expertise. In all honesty, I'm not even entirely sure > which system logs to check, or how to check them.
Isolating the problems and establishing what is the likly cadidate for blame should help to point you to a log file. Generally speaking, few services should bring a system to a halt: the kernel (kind of like a service for hardware to the user's applications) (check /var/log/kern* and dmesg |less ) modules loaded into the kernel (should really be considered part of kernel up above) (check /var/log/kern* and dmesg |less ) X - a seriously big piece of software. If you enable certain direct access options or GLX/GL options etc, there is risk for X to crash a system. Where the log file is for this may differ from one distro to another. A common spot is /var/log/XFree86* but may not be "there". You cans also try looking for /var/log/xdm* /var/log/gdm* or /var/log/kd* if you think it might be X related. Beyoind the above, any daemonized or inetd service can also kill a system by exhausting memory (actually nearly any program can do this). When this kind of "bug" hits a system, it often does not freez - it just becomes slower and more difficult to deal with over time (sometimes seconds or minutes or hours - it depends upon how aggressive the "bug" is and how much in the way of resources you have. Two intentional "bugs" like these that are very aggressive is an intentional fork-bomb or memory-grabber, but these are intentional attacks run on a system and in most cases lead up to the final freez by noting the system's performance getting worse, and a review of "uptime" or top show the system load is much higher than usual. > I'm just hoping it isn't hardware... I'm not all that keen on replacing my > hard drive. ;-) [chop] This kind of problem is usually not hard drive. With hardware problems, you might see things more like IRQ/IO conflicts, overheating, overclocking, not fully supported hardware and experimental drivers in Linux, etc. -ME -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(++) !s !a+++(-----) C++$(++++) U++++$(+$) P+$>+++ L+++$(++) E W+++$(+) N+ o K w+$>++>+++ O-@ M+$ V-$>- !PS !PE Y+ !PGP t@-(++) 5+@ X@ R- tv- b++ DI+++ D+ G--@ e+>++>++++ h(++)>+ r*>? z? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about: http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
