Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 12:04:31 -0500 From: Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz> To: Paul Schmehl <pauls@utdallas.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: What are the likely causes of reboots? Message-ID: <434A9F1F.3000305@daleco.biz> In-Reply-To: <F0EAE3DB1691D5877B62DBA2@utd59514.utdallas.edu> References: <F0EAE3DB1691D5877B62DBA2@utd59514.utdallas.edu>
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Paul Schmehl wrote: > Since I only got one answer, I'm resending this in the hope that > others will respond. > > I maintain a small hobby website running on FreeBSD 5.4. I'm > pasting in the dmesg.boot at the end of this post so you can see the > hardware. > > In the past week, the server has rebooted three times, and I can't > find any explanation for it in the logs. I *suspect* these might be > "mistakes" by the ISP's techs (or possibly the UPS isn't really > working as it should), but I want to rule out other possible > explanations before I talk to them. > > What are the possible causes of spontaneous reboots? > And what artifacts would be left behind that might > indicate the source of the problem? Are there any > utilities I can use to monitor the system and possibly > discover the source of the problem? Any special files > or logs in unusual places that might give me a clue? Back not so long ago in the 4.8/4.9 days, we had a box that was probably built in the 2.X or 3.X days, running -STABLE in a remote, unattended location that would reboot every morning between 3-4 a.m. or so. When we finally got to where it was to check on it, we found that the CPU fan had quit running some time previously. I have no idea why it didn't just burn up the processor; apparently, the only hard work it did was tar'ring up its files for backup every morning, which it did via cron starting at 3:05 a.m. It would then happily reboot and do all of its chores until backup time again the next morning. All this anecdotal stuff to say that monitoring your system temperature remotely, if possible, might be a good thing to do, in case it gave you some clues. Unfortunately, it's pretty hardware specific, as one might expect. /usr/ports/sysutils/healthd http://people.freebsd.org/~dwhite/ipmi/ etc................ KDK
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