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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
cc: current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: problem with -current system grinding to a halt... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 04 Aug 1996 12:52:44 +0930."
             <199608040322.MAA06694@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Sun, 04 Aug 1996 00:44:46 -0700
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>
>I commented about this a day or few ago, but at that point I was still
>chasing other possibilities, so here I go again 8)
>
>I have a reasonably -curent system that, under moderate load is dying 
>after about 18-20 hours of uptime.  The system itself is a P120 on a
>Triton board with 64M and an NCR PCI controller :
>
>FreeBSD mstradar.esrange.ssc.se 2.2-CURRENT FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT #0: Mon Jul 15 13:16:26 MET DST 1996     msmith@spore.atrad.adelaide.edu.au:/usr/work/radarsys/compile/MSTRADAR  i386
>
>The system is being pushed fairly lightly, although there are some long-lived
>processes that accumulate a lot of CPU (and have largeish swap footprints).
>These large processes are all Linux a.out binaries (IDL).
>
>Symptoms are that the system remains pingable, and you can often get 
>through the telnet login sequence to the point where /usr/bin/login
>is invoked but no further.  As I type, the system just died under me again;
>I was watching the output of 'systat -vmstat', quit and typed 'w' to check 
>the load.  I got this :
>
>mstradar:/home/radar>w
> 5:04AM  up 19:28, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
>USER     TTY FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
>
>and then nothing more.
>
>There have been no console or syslog messages to date from any of the
>times that this has happened.  Any suggestions as to where to start
>looking would be appreciated; unfortunately due to the rather remote
>location of the system I can't play DDB with it 8(

   This can happen if your nameserver isn't reachable. Have you tried "w -n" ?
This disables the nameserver lookups and is useful for this specific problem.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project