How to diagnose crashes?

[Casey Scott]

> My FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE box seems to be spontaneously restarting from
> time to time.
>
> I have not yet contacted the colo facility to determine if it's a power
> issue, but wonder if anyone can help me out in how to diagnose whether
> or not it's a server crash and not a power problem.
>
> Where should I look for tips / hints that might help me determine the
> cause of a crash that forced a reboot?
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
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Did the reboot occur during a high network load? In my case, the reboots seem 
to be related to the kernel TCP/IP stack. The box reboots under network load 
way too often. I don't suspect any other hard problem with it. It handle 
kernel builds and makeworlds w/o incident. MemTest86 did not find any 
problems with the memory. 

I have seen some other posts on this list about this issue. The posters 
thought it was a problem with SMP kernels. I compiled a uniproc kernel and 
just had another spontaneous reboot last night! 

After looking for .core, you may want to capture /dev/console messages to a 
log file.  I am assuming since the box is colo'd, you don't have console 
access. You may still miss some output though.

Casey