Sudden Reboots

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 10:03:00AM -0400, Jim Durham wrote:
> I have had this problem now with at least 3 FreeBSD servers over a period of 
> about 2 years. I had put it down to some hardware problem but it seems to be 
> too much of a coincidence with 3 different machines doing the same thing.
> 
> The first time was when I put 4.5-RELEASE on a brand new Dell Poweredge 2650. 
> I ran it on the bench for a week or so, then decided all was well and put it 
> in the server rack and started doing the company's email service on it. After 
> a few weeks, it suddenly would 'reboot' for no apparent reason. No log 
> entries, nothing at all except the usual stuff in /var/log/messages about '/ 
> was not unmounted correctly', etc. Just like you had pulled the power plug.
> 
> The 2nd instance was a server that I maintain for an ISP that was a mirror 
> image of their primary server, a 'hot spare' so to speak. The primary, 
> running the same software was solid, but the backup would reboot at about 
> 5:20 every morning with the same syndrome..no log entries of any sort and 
> just the usual entries in /var/log messages saying the the / partition was 
> not unmounted properly. The odd thing was that it was happening at virtually 
> the same time every morning.
> 
>  I upgraded both systems to the latest -RELEASE and it made no difference. 
> Then, they both just *stopped doing it by themselves* with no apparent 
> correlation to anything installed software-wise. Neither server has had any 
> problem for over a year now.
> 
> The 3rd instance is happening now. Another server I maintain for my 'night 
> job' is doing the same thing for a customer. It just 'stops' like you pulled 
> the power plug. However, this time I thought to check using 'last' and found 
> that I had accidentally left an ssh session open and that entry said 'crash'.
> There are no other log entries I can find related to the 'reboot'.

Do you have ddb enabled?  If not, the machine may be panicking and
rebooting automatically.  Actual "spontaneous reboots" are very rare
and usually caused by hardware problems (e.g. faulty power supply,
overheating CPU, bad RAM).  Enable DDB, and see what happens the next
time it crashes.

Kris
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