FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE (April 5, 2006) randomly rebooting on Dell Poweredge 650

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Matt Watson wrote:

> I'm not sure if this is the right place to be sending this or not but I 
> figured I'd give it a shot.

This (freebsd-stable) is a good place to send the message.

Do you have a serial console on the box?  If not, could you try putting one on 
there?  Some kernel output, especially in the event of a crash, doesn't end up 
in the system log as (for example) the file system may not be available.  If 
you configure a serial console being logged to another machine, you can more 
reliably log crash information.  Information on setting up a serial console 
can be found in the FreeBSD Handbook, but the short of it is that you can put 
a null modem cable to another box on the first serial port, and add:

     console="comconsole"

to /boot/loader.conf.  FreeBSD will normally reboot after a kernel panic if 
debugging isn't enabled, in which case you should see the output.  And if you 
don't see output, it's probably a bad hardware interaction rather than a 
kernel panic.

Robert N M Watson

>
> The subject line pretty much says it all, I have a Dell Poweredge 650 box 
> running 6.1-PRERELEASE which was cvsup'd on April 5, 2006.  The box has now 
> twice rebooted on its own for no aparant reason.  Its a fresh install as 
> well, and appears to have been doing this ever since it was installled. The 
> first time the box was only up for approximently 2 days and rebooted, the 2nd 
> time it was up for approximently 10 days.  I have all.log setup to log all 
> syslog messages however when the reboot occured there is no information in 
> the log which indicates anything going wrong...  Here is a small cut from the 
> log at the time of the reboot.  As can be seen, one minute there is an imapd 
> process, the next entry is the system restarting.
>
>
> Apr 16 20:55:34 clearwater imapd: LOGOUT, user=XXXXXX, 
> ip=[::ffff:WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ], headers=0, body=0, time=0
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater syslogd: restart
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2006 The FreeBSD 
> Project.
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater kernel: Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 
> 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater kernel: The Regents of the University of 
> California. All rights reserved.
> Apr 16 20:59:36 clearwater kernel: FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #0: Wed Apr  5 
> 20:46:37 EDT 2006
>
> This machine previously had Linux installed on the box and did not display 
> the same problems, so I'm going on the assumption that its not a hardware 
> failure.
>
> Aside from the reboots the box has been preforming extermely well.
>
> If anybody can provide some insights or suggestions I'd greatly appreciate 
> it.
>
> Thanks,
> Matt Watson
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