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Date:      Mon, 24 Mar 2003 17:04:13 -0500
From:      dave <dave@asylum.org>
To:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Freebsd - restarting itself?!
Message-ID:  <5.1.0.14.2.20030324164946.032527a0@asylum.org>
In-Reply-To: <BAA49A98.4698%ukla@attbi.com>

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At 02:20 PM 3/24/2003, Steve Warwick wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>Is it possible for FreeBSD to shut itself down and restart for no reason?

No. It won't happen spontaneously without a reason. The reason is not always
intuitively obvious, but it won't happen without a reason.

I've had FreeBSD servers run for 14-18months without a single reboot. When one
of them starts crashing or rebooting, there is a reason. Recently I  began 
having
this happen on a previously stable machine (no reboot for 9 months) and I
eventually traced it down to a hard drive that began to fail.

I've seen it be RAM, CPU cooling fan, HD, video card. I've learned the hard way
to spend the extra money and buy good hardware. I've got an Intel 
providence dual
ppro MB box that typically will run 12+ months between reboots, only 
rebooting it
when the HD gets full and I need to add another one, or i feel like i 
really want to
reinstall the OS because i wonder if someone cracked it and replaced all the
binaries ;).


>My machine was restarted last night and my hosting company claims they did
>not touch the server or have any problems. This has been going of for a few
>months now -- intermittent restarts that no one claims responsibility for.

If they have the root passwd i'd change it.  UPS is also mandatory.


>This is a new machine with the latest OS (4.7) so I can't blame a faulty
>power supply or something like -- I have more fans than Britney in the
>server, for HD and CPU so I don't think it's a temp problem.

I've actually found that new hardware is more likely to fail than old hardware,
(except perhaps hard drives).  If hard ware doesn't fail initially i've found
it will last until it becomes obsolete. (generally speaking).

I've found this can be a long process to track down. It usually requires 
changing
one thing at a time, and waiting. If you change too many things at once then
you won't know which one made the diff.  I'd start with a root passwd 
change and
make sure I have a good UPS.

good luck
dave



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