From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Nov 20  3:41:35 2001
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Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 11:41:07 +0000 (GMT)
From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
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To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com>
Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>,
	FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>,
	Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Subject: Re: Mysterious boot during the night
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On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote:

> Greg writes:
>
> > You'll note also that a surprising number of
> > spontaneous reboots take place during nightly
> > cron jobs; there's more than just "hardware failure"
> > behind that.
>
> So what are the other reasons?  My mysterious reboot did indeed appear to take
> place during a nightly cron job--some sort of default thing that sends me a
> summary of system and security problems each morning (I didn't set it up, it was
> just there).

OK, well, there are some indicators you might follow.

Is this reboot happening nightly at the same time?

There was a cron job running find at the time. What filesystem types do
you have mounted? Have you got anything odd (loopback, union, ntfs)
there?

Is there a half-formed mail sitting in a queue somewhere indicating
which jobs were running at the time? Can you force a crash manually by
going through the nightly, weekly, monthly periodic jobs?

jan

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
and Nostradamus never dreamed of the Church of the Accellerated Worm


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