FreeBSD shutting down unexpectedly

[Gary Corcoran]

FreeBSD wrote:
> Hi everyone, 
> 
> I'm having a problem with my FreeBSD server shutting down for no reason. This started happening recently (within the last month) so I'm not sure if the hardware is dying or if there's another underlying problem. The server is a rackmountable 1U chassis at a remote location connected to an APC UPS. When I lose connectivity and go to physically inspect the server, it's powered off completely as if there was a power outage. However, each time I can confirm that the UPS did not lose power and there were no voltage spikes (the APC can be managed via telnet and SNMP so there are logs I can look at). So far the only way I've been able to reproduce the problem is by running "portsdb -Uu" to update the ports DB after a cvsup of the ports tree. I suppose this is a CPU/disk intensive task so maybe I have a dying hard drive? Running this command used to take about 10 minutes for me, now when I run it about 5 minutes later the box powers off mysteriously. There's nothing in /var/log/me
ssa
>  ges and after I bring it back up, dmesg does not show anything unusual. I setup a console server to monitor this server's console but there was absolutely nothing on the console during the last such "crash".
> I'm looking for some suggestions on how to troubleshoot this problem, perhaps I can enable crash dump files or some sort of debugging? Here's some output:
<snip>
> Any suggestions would be welcome. 

You may have a failing, or underpowered, power supply, which could cause
flakiness when you have large amounts of CPU and/or disk activity.

Or, sorry to say, you may be yet another victim of the "bad capacitors"
that have plagued many motherboards, even from quality makers, during
the past few years.  Do a google search, or try this site that google
just showed me, for what to look for: http://www.badcaps.net/

Gary