Where to look when your Linux server goes to lunch...

[bwoodley]

I have a Linux Server RH 7.1, and it locks up sometimes at night (2-3 times a week). I havent been able to determine what is going on at all. When I check the server in the morning even the console is dead... I have to hit the reset button to get to it back up! All networking is gone, no pings... nothing! I'm not that well versed in problem handeling on Linux... Does anyone out there have any ideas as to what I could check in order to resolve this problem?

Thanks for reading!!!

~Brian

 

[thedaver]

/var/log/*

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/2/2003/05/4/61679

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[bwoodley]

Got that much, which log and what possibly?

 

[dbase77]

Hi,

Check you messages log file under /var/log as pointed by thedaver.

feroz

 

[thedaver]

Make sure that you log a copy of everything to something besides the terminal screen. Often the CRIT or EMERG events are profiled to go to screen and sometimes aren't written to disk. Take a serious look at your syslog.conf and make sure that everything is being written to a log. The newest log should *potentially* reveal what the last task was.

I'm suspecting that you have a cron job problem, but its been rare in my experience that a program problem can cripple a server that badly.

You may want to consider that you have a RAM problem, which can lead to these kinds of wipe outs without a history.

Nonetheless, start will logging everything to seperate logs, check the /var/log/messages file for the most recent history (remember your boot up adds to this, so the last events are a couple of pages "back&quot, and start making a paper log of the events to see if there's a pattern.


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[thedaver]

How timely, the geek crew over at Slashdot just tackled this question.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/14/2226230&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=185&tid=190

You didn't write the question there too did you? ;-)


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http://www.surfinbox.com/shares/