total system freeze - where to look for more information

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 06:09:18PM +0200, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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!

See the developers handbook chapter on kernel debugging