Server 'freezing'

[Rob Brandt]

The server was frozen again Monday morning, so the suggested fix
of replacing the motherboard battery didn't do the job.

I hope someone has a clue about this, or can suggest a stragegy to
diagnose the problem.  Here's the latest information I can offer;
don't know if it's relevent or not:

Half of the time that it happens it's been on a Monday morning
before work.  The rest of the time except once it's been on
another day before work.  Once it was in the evening after work. 
It's never happened while I've been here.  The server doesn't get
a lot of traffic, but when it does it's usually in bunches.  I
suppose inactivity may be a contributing factor.  I frequently
check my mail during the day.  But come to think of it, I have a
utility checking a special pop account for new messages every 15
minutes all the time.

Right now I have a problem with the server that may or may not be
related.  While sorting my mail this morning, I noticed it beig
very slow.  Gnome was running, and I have several "load" panels
running in the tool bar - RAM, CPU and Net.  I noticed that CPU
was running at 100% and not varying.  I tried to start gtop to see
what was sucking cycles, but it was unresponsive.  I had a console
window and browser window open, and I closed those, and noticed
that the icons on the desktop didn't redraw.  Attempting to log
out, that was unresponsive too.  On my desktop Mac, I browsed to
Webmin on the server and viewed the Running applications to see
what was sucking up the cycles; it was Courier-Imap.  I killed
that, restarted Courier-Imap, and the CPU load panel on the server
went down to normal levels.  But Gnome itself is still
unresponsive.  I can't start applications, log out, the icons on
the desktop still haven't redrawn.  The toolbar is responsive and
the load panels inside of it are active.

Like I said, I don't know if this is related to the server freeze
or not.  When the server freezes, I have no network services but I
do now.  When the server freezes, the CRT won't wake up, but does
now.

(dramatic pause)

OK, new information.  As I was trying to send the above, it was
apparent that some of my mail services weren't working because it
wouldn't send.  Other network services such as apache were OK.  So
I decided to reboot the server; when it rebooted it said that the
file systems weren't unmounted cleanly and forced a file system
check.  There were unexpected inconsistencies, so I had to run
fsck.  There were several inode problems, after they were fixed it
rebooted again and started OK.  I'm back up and running.

But it appears that some questions have been answered: namely that
the "unexpected inconsistencies" were not the result of power
off/on rebooting I had to resort to when the system freezes, since
it happened now after I did a normal reboot.  Quite possibly the
unexpected inconsistencies are the cause of the freezing.

Any ideas on further diagnosis?

Thanks



> I am having a problem for the last month or so and don't know
> what to  do about it.  It's happened 4 times in November, and
> last night as  well.
>
> The server "freezes".  It is completely unresponsive to the
> keyboard,  http, mail services, telnet, ssh, and ftp.  I can
> successfully ping  it.
>
> When this has happened, I end up having to shut it down at the
> power  button and reboot.  When rebooting it goes through the
> filesystem  check and often encounters and Unexpected
> Inconsistency, requiring me  to run fsck.  After going through
> that, it fixes several things
> (sometimes a lot, sometimes a little) and then loads properly
> and all  is well.  For a while.  Then it does it again in 2 to
> 14 days.  I  don't know whether the unexpected inconsistency is
> the cause or the  result of the "freeze".
>
> Are there any diagnostics that I can perform to discover the
> problem?  If there are file system errors causing this, are
> there utilities  that can be run that will prevent it or
> minimize the risk?
>
> Any advice appreciated.  Running:
>
> Beige G3 Tower;
> YDL 2.2
> 768 MB Ram
> YDL boot disk : original 4gig IDE (hda8)
> Data disk for /home and /var: New (2 mos) 60 gig IBM (hdb2 & 3)
>
> All of the above partitions have exhibited the Unexpected
> Inconsistency.
>
> Rob
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