Random Restarts?

[Edward Ruggeri]

On Sun, 20 May 2007 13:23:00 -0500, Garrett Cooper  
<youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:

> Roland Smith wrote:
>> On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 11:03:25AM -0500, Edward Ruggeri wrote:
>>>  Hi,
>>>
>>>  My system randomly reboots, usually in the evening.  It is definitely  
>>> not a  soft reboot, since the filesystems don't get properly  
>>> dismounted.  My  suspicion is that it is a heat related issue -- I do  
>>> leave the computer  running just about all day long, and it has  
>>> started to get warm.  Then  again, it's coolest in the evening...
>>  Try and install the mbmon port, and see if it works on your machine. If
>> so, start a cron job that appends mbmon output to a file say every 15
>> minutes. If it's a heat buildup issue in a monitored component, it  
>> would show.
>>  I wonder though. My machine usually doesn't need a day to heat up after
>> a cold start. An hour or so usually suffices.
>>  Other causes could be a spike in the line voltage due to a large device
>> switching on or off nearby. Or an underrated power supply overloaded
>> through a cron job.
>>   Roland
>
> Also, check to see if your memory doesn't have any errors. That can  
> cause reboots from time to time if either the memory controller is bad,  
> or the memory itself is bad.
>
> Also, this heat issue could be true for your hard drives. I've seen some  
> of my faster drives get up to 140 degrees F (before I bought fans for  
> them), then force the workstation to hard reboot. This was when I was  
> doing a lot of disk access with them, too, since normal idling didn't  
> head up the drives enough.
>
> Just curious:
> a. What's your Processor (speed, vendor)?
> b. Who made your motherboard?
> c. Who made your RAM?
>
> Thanks,
> -Garrett

Thanks everyone!

Athlon X2 4200+ proc (2.2GHz, maybe?)
DFI nF4 infinity SLI motheboard
G.Skill RAM (2GB)
Antec True Power II (550W)

I'll use MemTest or somesuch to test my RAM latter today for errors.

The drives sit right infront of the air-intake fans for the system, so  
there's a breeze that flows by them constantly.  However, additional  
cooling certainly might be necessary.  Perhaps, it is possible that  
rTorrent is doing a lot of reads and writes to the drive, stressing it,  
which may be why the problem seems to have come up around the time I  
started using rTorrent.

I think my plan will be so:
1.) Continue running mbmon until I get a restart, and then check to see if  
there was a voltage drop (or, less likely, a heat spike).
2.) Then, run MemTest86+ for a day or so, checking for RAM problems.

I don't have a probe to measure the hard drive temps, but if 1&2 fail,  
I'll arrange better cooling for the drives, I guess.  If it's a driver  
issue, is there any way to find it?  I haven't installed any new hardware  
recently, and hadn't had this problem until maybe a week ago.

Sorry to clog up the freeBSD listhost with (likely) a hardware issue.  I  
can move to another listhost if you guys think I should.