On 2013-06-18 12:38, Karl E. Jorgensen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 01:59:07PM +0100, Chris Purves wrote: > >> After upgrading to wheezy, I get a system hang every one or two days >> where the system becomes completely unresponsive and I need do a >> cold boot. > >> This is an older machine with an Athlon processor. I'm not running >> X. I don't see anything unusual in the logs. The last entry in >> syslog is typically a cron job, but not always the same one. The >> system seems to freeze without any warning. > > When the system freezes, is there anything useful on the console? If > the kernel craps out, the result may not be visible in the log > files (because things can halt before buffers are flushed etc). > > It may be useful to disable screen blanking on the console for this - > the kernel may (or may not) wake up the console upon death. (I call > that the JFK syndrome: He never knew what hit him).
I disabled screen blanking and powersave on the console. We'll see if anything useful is displayed the next time it goes down. > A couple of candidates spring to mind: > > * Overheating? If the system is old, it may be full of dust and thus > the fans may struggle. Or the bearings get worn out. Insufficient > airflow and cooling does tend to make things go pop - except for > CPUs which (I believe) shut themselves down due to a built-in > self-preservation instinct courtesy of the hardware engineers. The CPU fan is about fours years old and the CPU temperature hovers around 50-55 C, however, perhaps some other component on the motherboard is getting too hot. I can check into that. > * Struggling power supply? If the power supply is just barely > providing enough power, random things which require more power may > cause voltage drops that some component take a dislike to. Although > the system *should* be consuming peak amount of power during > power-on peaks may also occur later. I am suspecting that it may be the power supply. I replaced it about two years ago, but maybe it's time again. If I don't get any good information from the console I may try replacing the power supply. > * Bad RAM? (already covered in a different part of the thread) > > * Bad capacitors? Older motherboards are more likely to suffer from > the capacitors going "pop". A web search for "Capacitor plague" is > probably more reliable and informative than I can achieve in this > email. I can take a look for that. >> I tried downgrading the kernel back to the squeeze version (2.6) and >> it still locks up. Before upgrading to wheezy I resized a few of the >> partitions. Other than that, nothing else has changed and everything >> had been running fine for years. > > Assuming that the resize was healthy, all should be ok. > > But... Since there are no clear suspects, paranoia dictates a run of > fsck on the affected file systems. Just in case. At least it is a > harmless check if you can afford the downtime while the file systems > are unmounted. > > Hope this helps > -- Chris Purves Visit my blog: http://chris.northfolk.ca "Nobody goes there no more; it's too crowded!" - Yogi Berra -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51c1a73e.6030...@northfolk.ca
