[lug] Daily system crash....

[George Sexton]

Well, what happened today was the screen activated when I pressed the 
Shift key.

I had left the console logged in.

I could type a command, but any command that I typed generated a command 
not found error.

If I remember previous crashes, I can activate other consoles by 
pressing CTRL-ALT-F?, but they don't let me login.


Zan Lynx wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 10:30 -0700, George Sexton wrote:
>> Zan Lynx wrote:
>>> You need a VGA or FB console, a serial console or netconsole, all of
>>> which have support for polled, no-interrupt, no-DMA output to be used
>>> during a crash.
>> Good luck. I have a machine that's dying, and it's not sending ANYTHING 
>> to the logged in console.
> 
> Try booting with the NMI watchdog enabled.  I add "nmi_watchdog=2,panic"
> to my kernel boot line.  The value 1 uses an IO-APIC, usually only
> available on multi-processor boards, and 2 uses one of the CPU
> performance counters but it'll work on single-CPU systems.
> 
> If your machine is getting stuck inside a kernel lock of some sort, the
> NMI watchdog can catch it.  I've had freezes where it didn't work
> though.  Never figured out why either.
> 
> 
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-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/