Alexander Hall wrote: > Try a serial console, if possible. I have not been able to view the ddb > output if the machine crashed while running X. Not sure if the caps lock > etc was unresponsive, though. I am on a Dell Inspiron 4100.
This laptop doesn't have any serial ports, but maybe one of those USB<->RS-232 cables will work for this? Although if it's X that's causing ddb not to appear, I can just exit back to the console when I'm not using the machine. It sometimes locks up immediately after or during the daily cron job. I enabled the "mark" stuff in syslog, and this is what shows up in /var/log/messages (daily cron runs at 08:30): Nov 11 07:49:37 icicle -- MARK -- Nov 11 08:09:38 icicle -- MARK -- Nov 11 08:29:38 icicle -- MARK -- Nov 11 10:08:40 icicle syslogd: restart Nov 11 10:08:40 icicle /bsd: OpenBSD 4.0 (GENERIC) #1107: Sat Sep 16 19:15:58 MDT 2006 Nov 11 10:08:40 icicle /bsd: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC I think that in this case the cron job finished because sendmail was invoked (this is /var/log/daemon): Nov 11 08:30:07 icicle identd[26402]: Connection from localhost.perlguru.net Nov 11 08:31:22 icicle identd[2040]: Connection from localhost.perlguru.net Nov 11 08:31:23 icicle identd[17847]: Connection from localhost.perlguru.net Nov 11 10:08:40 icicle named[1091]: starting BIND 9.3.2-P1 It's strange that the machine would freeze up *after* all the cron activity is finished. BTW, I removed softdep on all mounts in the fstab, in case that extra variable was an issue. Sadly X was running that day, so no ddb... > Or try typing "boot crash" or so, and see if anything happens, but you > maybe tried that earlier. Haven't tried that yet, but that's because I'm waiting for the machine to crash into ddb. :-) I can invoke ddb at the console with Ctrl-Alt-Esc, and then exit from it with "continue", but so far haven't been able to trigger it at the right time. I installed the "stress" package and tried using that to put some load on the system, but it hapilly kept chugging away all night long while running "stress --vm 1 --cpu 500".
