[mythtv-users] myth box crashed hard...

[and]

Thanky.

I'll try to keep 'top' running the next 24 hours and see what happens. 
At leas that way I'll know when it happened and as you mention I might 
even see what process' are hungry when it happens..

I'll look for OOPS in my logs

rgds
anders

On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 10:16 AM, Ray Olszewski wrote:

> Since a true "hard crash" clobbers everything (or, just possibly, 
> everything except the kernel), it is a difficult problem to diagnose, 
> And any onboard tool for diagnosing crashes would itself be hit by the 
> crash ... maybe too soon even to log what was happening just before 
> the crash (depends on the timing of drive syncs).
>
> So ... when I'm ancountering this sort of problem, I normally start an 
> ssh connection well before the problem occurs and run "top" over it. 
> When the test system crashes, the monitoring system still displays the 
> last update of "top", which gives me some clues about what happened 
> (as well as a close estimate of the time when it happened).
>
> Also, you say "the network connection was also down". In  
> troubleshooting what looks like a hard crash, it is worth seeing if 
> the system will respond to pings. Ping response is handled entirely 
> inside the kernel, and sometimes it survives a failure that completely 
> clobbers userspace, which helps you distinguish kernel-level and 
> user-level failures.
>
> Finally, if there is a kernel-level problem, the kernel will often 
> post an OOPS message to STDERR. You may be lucky enough that this gets 
> to the logs (I think this is sync-dependent). If not, it helps if you 
> have a VT rather than X displaying on the system, since the display 
> may survive the crash (depends on your hardware, I think)  and leave 
> you with some information (not complete, since you can't scroll back, 
> but at least the last 24 lines)about what happened.
>
> This is not a recipe; I don't know a recipe for this level of 
> troubleshooting. Sorry I can't be of more help.
>
> At 09:25 AM 9/11/2003 -0700, and wrote:
>> My epia m10k, 2.4.20-8,atrpms myth0.11 box crashed hard last night 
>> and it therefore forgot to record a program this morning. I had to 
>> hit the power button as everything was completely frozen so I 
>> couldn't do a thing with the keyboard and the network connection was 
>> also down, so I couldn't ssh in either... I'd like to prevent it in 
>> the future, but have no idea how to go about it.
>>
>> How do I track down the offending element?
>> - Is there a tool to see when and what is doing the crashing?
>>
>> Sorry if this is a stupid linux question, but it is my hope that 
>> someone else on the list have experiences that might help.... ;-)
>
>
>
>
>
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