On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 20:32:39 -0400, Michael Powell wrote: > kpn...@pobox.com wrote: > [snip] > > While we're throwing ideas onto the table let me mention power supplies. > > Power supplies and hard drives are in a race to see which one will fail > > first. It may be that the power supply is marginal and added load from > > the drives being hit hard may send it over the edge. How heavily loaded > > is the machine in question? > > Absolute and total agreement with this.
The idea of a hardware problem looks more and more obvious here. A software configuration problem could be located by diff'ing the currently used files against "stock files", or by checking the logs of a versioning system (if you use one to track your local configuration file changes, for example in a CVS reposi- tory). It could be a matter of power (by "more than usual" drain when the machine is heavily loaded), but also a file system inconsis- tency is possible. In case the machine is using a background fsck that silently fails to deal with a specific damage, using background_fsck="NO" in /etc/rc.conf to _definitely_ bring the file systems up _clean_ prior to multi-user mode booting would probably be a good idea. Using "smartctl" to check the hard disks SMART data would make sure the disk is not dying (and the reboot is an effect of that). Monitoring the server when (or while) it reboots would surely be interesting. Maybe open some sessions to have a close look at programs like "top", "systat -v" and "mbmon" (to check for temperatures and voltages) - and when run at 1 second intervals, it should be possible to obtain a good system status diagram of the "last state" before reboot, when the connection drops. > I once had a box where the RAM chips > would "sing" with a high-pitched whistle only during the 0300 periodic run. > It sounded just like the horizontal output on a television right before > destruction. :-) I have heared something comparable from a graphics card when developing some OpenGL demo stuff. :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
