On Fri, 07 Jul 2000 19:33:25 EDT, paul writes: >> My home-debian-box starts to behave rather odd lately, now and then it >> will freeze completely. >> >Is there anything consistent about the behavior? How long between reboot >and freeze? Are there any error messages during startup? What >applications are running when the machine freezes? (my bet is netscape) >What Debian version are you running (Slink, Potato)? What kernel version >are you running? Have you tried telneting to the machine to see if it is >a console only problem? Is the behavior in ANY way predictable? More info >is necessary if anyone is to be able to help.
The box is running slink, with all packages, except the kernel and samba, "apt-get upgrade"´d to potato. Uptime is between 30 min and 5 days, I´m running X w/ fvwm95, setiathome in the background and, when I´m home, netscrap _may_ run. The system is IDE with a SCSI-streamer and -CD-recorder on a ASUS P54C-mobo with 4x16 MB FP-RAM and a Matrox Mystique as gfx card. 3 PCI-ethernet-cards, one ISA, and a SB16. Problem is that I can´t find any similarities between the hangs, the box can run ok for a few days, burning CDs, ripping and encoding mp3s, looking for ETs ;-), and doing ~1k mails per day, and at 3 am (according to my ping stats from outside) it´ll freeze. Since the connection to the outside is via PPTP, which hangs too, I can´t reach it anymore, although it answers to ICMP from local networks. but I can´t even get a TCP connection open (it sends nothing back, not even a syn_ack). The box is running as-is now for about a year, but is ~3 years old, so I guess it´s simply getting old. Cheap hardware isn´t built for running a 24/7 server, I guess. It shouldn´t get too hot, since I already underclocked it from 66/2.5 to 60/2 and I´m having 2 extra fans, one cooling the PCI and ISA cards, one cooling RAM. Also it sometimes freezes when loaded, sometimes when idling (I´ve disabled setiathome for testing). But that´s not the real problem, I´ll simply get a new used PC (used P1´s are for sale at about $ 100) when I´m back from the trip, what I need for the time being is a solution where it would simply reboot when having trouble, and I _guess_ the software watchdog _may_ be what I´m looking for in this case. tia, &rw
