FreeBSD 7 server in hang

[Chris St Denis]

Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> "Gian Paolo Buono" <gpbuono at gmail.com> writes:
>
>   
>> Hi, I have on a server ibm 3650  FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE and the proccess
>> that running are nagios-3.0.2, apache-2.2.8 and heartbeat-1.2.5_3;
>> random after some day machine becomes semi-dead, the ping respond but
>> any stack (ssh,http) don't work and heartbeat don't switch the
>> resources I can't loggon  and I must reboot. In the syslog there
>> isn't  any message for trobleshotting the problem. Any idea ? Sorry
>> for my english
>> Best Regards
>>     
>
> Try keeping an eye on top(1); it may even give a hint after it stops
> updating.  If that doesn't help, you may need to break to the kernel
> debugger (details in developers' handbook).
>
>   
I also was having some lockup problems on a 3650. Don't know if it's 
related but I will document my experiences in case it's of any help.

Initially it was fine (Running 7.0-Release, but after some hardware 
problems the system was continuing to lockup even after the whole server 
was replaced. I ended up doing a clean install of 7-stable (as of August 
20th) and haven't had any problems since. Not sure if it was some odd 
corruption of kernel or other system files (server went through many 
hard reboots during the hardware problems) or a bug in 7.0-release that 
was fixed in 7-stable.

In my specific symptoms if I had something like top running on the 
console, it would continue to run. Top didn't show much of interest 
other than some 100% apache processes (which I suspect was a symptom of 
the problem, not the cause). When the system was hung top would continue 
running and updating, but it would not accept keyboard input. I could 
switch to other virtual consoles with alt+f#, but they also would not 
take text input for a login.