system failed, save tasks

[Tsu-Fan Cheng]

yeah, truely. i heard this voice coming out of my headset while i was
sitting in the living room enjoying some holiday movies :-) It took me a
while to attend to that, by the time I got to my console, my monitor had no
signal, but the power light on the box is on. I couldn't login remotely so I
press the reset button. I was running fluxbox-devel WM, I wonder if fluxbox
has some log somewhere, I will check.
btw, now i know that sk is junk, gladly i have another d-link card (rl) with
me, i shall switch to that.. thanks!!


TFC


On 12/26/06, Bill Moran <wmoran at collaborativefusion.com> wrote:
>
> In response to "T.F. Cheng" <tfcheng at yahoo.com>:
>
> > hi,
> >   i just got a weird computer voice, saying "system
> > failed, save tasks".
>
> By voice, do you mean it actually came out of the speakers?  If so, it's
> almost definitely your window manager (GNOME or KDE or whatever) and you
> should at least provide information on what WM you're using, but you
> might do even better to ask the question on a list dedicated to that WM.
>
> If that's not the case, then I don't know, I've never seen that particular
> message before.
>
> the system is running
> > FreeBSD  6.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-PRERELEASE #6: Sat
> > Dec  9 10:03:38 EST 2006
> > root@:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/TFCHENG  i386
> > i wondered what happened, i only have ssh running, and
> > there are some attempt of break-in as logged in the
> > auth.log,
>
> The failed attempts are fairly routine attacks and not much to worry
> about.  The successful attempts are the ones that should make you panic.
>
> In the /var/log/message, before i rebooted
> > the system, the only messages were (on 12/25) :
> > Dec 25 20:59:40  kernel: sk0: link state changed to
> > DOWN
> > Dec 25 20:59:42  kernel: sk0: link state changed to UP
> > Dec 25 20:59:56  kernel: sk0: link state changed to
> > DOWN
> > Dec 25 21:00:00  kernel: sk0: link state changed to UP
> > Dec 25 21:00:12  kernel: sk0: link state changed to
> > DOWN
> > Dec 25 21:00:14  kernel: sk0: link state changed to UP
> > Dec 25 21:19:45  kernel: sk0: link state changed to
> > DOWN
> > Dec 25 21:19:50  kernel: sk0: link state changed to UP
> > Dec 25 21:19:50  kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 4,
> > Channel 00000001
> > Dec 25 21:19:50  kernel: ad6: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA
> > retrying (1 retry left) LBA=8598287
> > Dec 25 21:19:53  kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 8,
> > Channel 00000000
> > Dec 25 21:19:53  kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 4,
> > Channel 00000001
> >
> > what might have happened? where should I look??
> >
> > thanks!!
>
> Looks like you have some cheap hardware.  I've never seen an sk network
> card that wasn't junk, and I seem to remember that they frequently
> reset themselves.  The ad6 error could indicate that your HDD is near
> failure, or it could just be that your system got overloaded with work
> at one point and the HDD was having trouble keeping up, as it seems to
> have recovered.  I don't know what the NVRM messages are, but they have
> the look of a sound card.
>
> --
> Bill Moran
> Collaborative Fusion Inc.
>