On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 01:37:12AM -0400, Michael Soulier wrote: > > So, I get home from finally seeing the X-Men movie (I truly > expected them to hack it up horribly, but I was impressed...) to find my > Debian box thrashing away like crazy. The mouse would barely respond, and > a ctrl-alt-backspace only partially shut down X. It just sort of hung > while the system went nuts, the harddrive sounding like it was about to > blow its way out the side of the tower. I waited and waited, but it didn't > give me a prompt, so I finally hit the reset. > It came back up fine, and all is well now, but looking in the > various logs, I can't tell what it was doing when this occurred. If > someone can give me a hint of what to look for and where, I'd love to > track this down to prevent it happening again.
I've had experiences on memory anemic systems going into fatal thrash in low-memory situations. Your best bet may be to ssh into the box and start shutting down processes. This works becuase ssh runs a number of listener daemons which actually (IIUC) exec() a shell, meaning you can get a process running even in some situations when a fork() won't work. I'd used this to get first a user shell, then "exec su" to root, then "exec sash" to get the sash shell, though the problem in this case was a fully occupied process table. If you compile your kernel with magic-sysrq support, you can sometimes regain control of your system by using the key combinations it supports to shut down processes and restore a usable state. If that fails, you can usually safely unmount drives to prevent data loss. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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