Unexpected shutdown

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 11:58:49PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 10:12:34PM +0100, n j wrote:
> > I know there are many possibilities out there, but I am pondering this
> > for the whole day and ruled out everything that came to mind. So, any
> > other ideas - even humorous - are welcome.
> 
> Since it was a regular shutdown as opposed to a panic, something must
> have triggered that shutdown.
> 
> UPS drivers can shut the system down, but you seemed to have ruled
> that out?
> 
> It could be triggered by the acpi_thermal driver. Check system
> temperatures with sysctl or mbmon.
> 
> Roland


	If the system both shutdown *and* rebooted, I had  the same 
	inexplicable thing happen to me many times.  It began happening
	to my Dell 8200 (hmm?) say, three months ago, and I 
	believe I solved the problem about 6 weeks ago.  

	There was some unknown fs fault in my /var slice.  Just by sheer
	chance, I watched my server abruptly powered down when something 
	[maybe] tried to write to /var/* and failed.   At first I
	thought it was bad memory; then, just-maybe, a bad drive.
	(The drive is new, and 512MB of the DDR is also new.)  I
	also thought it was a heat problem, and that I needed another
	fan.   ... .

	Long story short, I  saved /var /<somewhere>, then found
	something I couldn't remove. chflags did no good.   Finally
	I did a /bin/rm -rf /var.  After I added it back, newfs'd it,
	and copied back the stuff, no-more-spontaneous-and-random
	reboots.

	gary

	PS: it was fsck that couldn't fix the bad spot. The fault was
	    related to an inode allocation snafu.  but i've  never 
	    hacked any fs code, so ....  



> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
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