total system freeze - where to look for more information

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 07:35:11PM +0200, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Zbigniew Szalbot pisze:
> 
> >Dear all,
> >
> >Today - for the first time ever - I have a total system freeze. It 
> >occured after 105 days of uninterrupted work. The freeze was 
> >unrecoverable because even though I attached a screen to the machine, I 
> >was not able to do anything with it. I had to hard-reboot it.
> >
> >dmesg.today has just one line (and dmesg.yestarday is empty).
> >
> >pid 25536 (portmanager), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
> >
> >This file was modified at night so it does not contain any useful 
> >information.
> >
> >Where can I look for more information? The only thing that comes to my 
> >mind is that today I installed denyhosts-2.6. It is possible that the 
> >freeze occured during dump operation which is done to a network drive 
> >mounted via mount_nfs option.
> 
> 
> Could the dump operation (a very likely reason for the crash) freeze the 
> system. I am thinking of the following scenario. The dump operation to a 
> network share is underway. For some reason, the LAN network connection 
> is unavailable for a short time. Dump freezes and never recovers as it 
> cannot continue its operation. I went back to the box two hours after 
> the dump operation had started but the box (FBSD machine) did not 
> respond to physically connected keyboard and screen. The dump file on 
> the network is shown to have 0 KB. Thanks for any info!

If it thinks it ran out of media space (maybe doe to some network error,
I don't know), it could be waiting for a response at the console or 
whatever terminal it was running from.  It will "hang" there until it 
gets some input it knows how to handle.

////jerry

> 
> >
> >FreeBSD lists.lc-words.com 6.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE #0: Mon Jan 
> >22 12:52:41 CET 2007     root at 192.168.11.51:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/LISTS  
> >i386
> >
> >Many thanks in advance!
> >
> >Zbyszek
> >_______________________________________________
> >freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> >http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> >To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
> >"freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"