Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:32:08 -0600
From:      "J. Seth Henry" <jshenry@net-noise.com>
To:        <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        <durham@w2xo.pgh.pa.us>
Subject:   Re: questions-digest V5 #85
Message-ID:  <006901c0905a$5fc66db0$0e01a8c0@guinevere>
References:  <bulk.20735.20010205210555@hub.freebsd.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Given the description of the problem, I would say that the problem is in X.
Every great once in a while, my X session will lock - producing similar
symptoms: no keyboard/mouse. The system is far from dead though. I have a
dumb terminal attached to one of the serial ports, and I can log in as root
and kill the offending processes. Then, I kill -HUP init, and this *usually*
restores the console. Keep in mind, it's only happened about 3 or 4 times -
and it worked twice... ;) If that doesn't work, I can gracefully shutdown
the system. Definitely recommended!


Since you said you could ping the machine, which implies you have more than
one on your network. You should be able to telnet/ssh in and do the same.

Good luck,
Seth Henry
jshenry@net-noise.com

Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 21:45:10 -0500 (EST)
From: Jim Durham <durham@w2xo.pgh.pa.us>
Subject: 4.2 Problem possibly I/O related

Due to the nature of this problem, I can't do any tracing.

I have noticed several times since upgrading to 4.2-RELEASE
that the system will just "freeze".

When this happens, you can still ping the IP of the machine
on the local network, but you cannot get a telnet or ftp connection.

You can not switch from X to a virtual terminal. The mouse pointer
is non-responsive. The NUMLOCK key on the keyboard is non-responsive.
However, something is still alive, as you can ping it.

The only way out is a reboot. This is definitely "Un-FreeBSD-Like"
behavior! I have been running FreeBSD for about 3 years on this
machine, a P200MMX with 64 megs RAM and Tyan motherboard.

The only clue I have is that I was attaching a 1.5 meg file in
Netscape mail. I have also had this happen on certain web pages.
Not ofter, but once or twice in a couple months.

The other time I have had this happen was when writing to a
bad floppy disk (bad sectors) using mtools.

The file attachment caused a lot of disk activity and perhaps,
given the floppy's causing the same of similar problem, this
is I/O related? Just a wild guess.

This could, of course, be a hardware problem that is creeping up,
or a problem in XFree86 (I've never seen this in a virtual terminal).

Anyone else seen this kind of behavior? I'm fairly certain that
4.1 did not do this.

Does anyone have a suggestion for getting some useful information
from the system. There is no crase, per se, so no crash dump.

- -Jim Durham




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?006901c0905a$5fc66db0$0e01a8c0>