Hard crash on 6.x -- reproducible, multiple people affected

[Duane Whitty]

Peter Thoenen wrote:
> --- Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 04:09:30PM -0400, Anish Mistry wrote:
>>     
>>>> It's not clear what he means by "hard crash", but he also says
>>>> power off", which is the part that is most confusing to me.
>>>>         
>>> Hmmm...I missed that part.  Yeah, if it powers off then I'm not
>>>       
>> sure what you can do to debug it.
>>     
>
> By hard crash I mean the box just instantly powers off.  No shutdown
> syncs, no error, panic's, or dump generated, nothing logged in syslog,
> and I have a serial cable hooked up to another another dumb terminal
> hoping to maybe catch a panic or some debug message dumped out over
> serial as it goes down but nothing there also.  It just stops. 
>
> Also note that this didn't happen on 5.x.  And when not running those
> particular ports the box stays up just fine for weeks on end.  Just
> tried again with 6.1 PRERELEASE and same issue.
>
>   
>> About all I can think of is to try to reproduce the problem with
>> enough logging enabled (e.g. running the binary under ktrace), with
>> sync-mounted filesystem, and hope that the last few entries give the
>> software developer enough of a clue what the process was doing at the
>> time of shutdown (the operation itself probably will not be logged)
>> that he can focus the investigation further.
>>     
>
> Want to walk me through this and will do.  As I said, reproducible.
>
> NOTE: I doubt it a linux syscall issue as i2p / freenet / and tor are
> all build on FBSD, not linux binaries.  Freenet and I2P do use
> linux-java (as the new diablo ones aren't avaiable for amd64) BUT tor
> does not.  Its all C.  Also as noted, other people (using i386, not
> just amd64) have emailed me (as the tor maintainer) with the exact same
> problem on entirely different hardware (different nics, motherboards,
> proc's etc etc).  Somebody suggested maybe a ACPI issue but I just
> don't see how that could me it.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>   
Anyone got a hardware debugger (breakout box) they know how to use?
I don't hear much about them anymore but I think this is the kind of
problem they were useful for helping with.  Maybe I'm thinking of
something else, its been a long time.

Duane

-- 
duane at greenmeadow.ca