FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE amd64 hangs

[Matej Šerc]

Hi,

I am experiencing a strange issue that has never occurred to me in all the
years of using different versions of FreeBSD.

One of our servers, which was running without any issues until yesterday,
stopped responding for two times now - yesterday and today. About three days
ago another process of pulling out SNMP data from devices was added, but I
was looking the system load and the system was working normally and also
processes were cmpleting successfully within the timeframe of 5 minutes
(much faster, they completed in about 2 minutes). I also want to mention
that those SNMP pulling processes were already working about a month or so
on the same server (no hardware was changed in the meantime) and I am pretty
sure that it should work normally as it did.

My main problem is, that there is abcolutely nothing in log files - no
errors, no warnings, nothing. No strange messages, every process just stops
logging at one time and then continues after the reboot. Another interesting
issue is that both hangs occured at approximately the same time, but there
was nobody in the server room and also no one was logged into the server at
that time except me. About 10 minutes before hang I was investigating
processes and everything was very normal - no large CPU eating or memory
eating processes. This might be interesting, even after every process stops
responding, I was still able to ping the network interfaces and receive ICMP
replies back.

Of course my idea about it is that it must be connected to some hardware
problems - my suggestion was to make some memory tests. But I would like to
hear some your oppinions about the entire situation. Could some power supply
issues be doing it? The server is about a year old and has, as I already
mentioned, worked like a charm until now. How come there is no kernel panic
since no daemon seems to be working? Why is network interface still up and
working?

I was unable to go to the co-location facility so I can't say what was on
the screen at both times, but I suppose there was nothing else than messages
I can read from log files.

I know that 7.2 is pretty old version, but it was working until now on the
same hardware and we had no reason to change that. Now the system is after
reboot again running smoothly and without any issues at all.

Thank you very much for any information regarding the issue.

BR, Matej