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Date:      Thu, 8 Mar 2001 14:49:35 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Joe Loughry" <loughry@qwest.net>
To:        henryammons@yahoo.com, questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Intermittant freezing problems
Message-ID:  <200103082149.OAA19123@miranda.dnvr.uswest.net>

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I'm afraid I can't help with your problem directly, but I would like to
report something similar that has been happening to my 3.5-STABLE box  
ever since it was a 3.2-RELEASE  :)

The problem manifests as unexpected freeze-ups, at random intervals, for
random amounts of time, usually several times a day.  If left alone, the
system will eventually pick up where it left off as if nothing happened
(although the time-of-day clock will be wrong, because it stopped along
with everything else).  EVERYTHING is frozen--the machine does not respond
to the console keyboard, tty ports, or pings.  The syscons cursor stops
blinking.

It does respond to the reset button, however.  If I leave it alone long
enough, it comes out if this coma after anywhere from 10 seconds to more
than 14 hours.  Time of occurrence and duration are random--I've graphed
them from data collected by another machine that continually pings the
troublesome host every 10 seconds to see if it is alive.

Nearly every component except the motherboard and the IDE controller has
been replaced (the IDE controller is integrated into the motherboard).  I
suppose I should try replacing that next.  The machine is a Pentium Pro
200 (underclocked to 150 MHz in an attempt to see if it was a heat-related
problem) with 128 MB of Kingston SIMM memory.  Thinking it was a heat
issue, I monitored the CPU heatsink temperature with a thermocouple and
installed additional fans and ducting until the temperature stayed below
30 celsius all the time.  I turned off the distributed.net client because
I thought that might be the trouble.  I turned off the syscons screen
saver.  The machine doesn't run X, and the kernel has been configured to
include the minimum required by this hardware.  Replacing the video card,
serial ports, Ethernet card, and processor all have not helped.  There is
never an error message on the console or in the logs...and I can't get a
kernel debug trace because when it happens, the machine is completely
nonresponsive.

It only happens on this one machine.  I think I'm going to cure it by
installing a Pentium III, some DIMMs, a Fast Ethernet card, and a 50 GB
SCSI disk drive....

-Joe

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