Troubleshooting server crashes

[Keith Mastin]

Hey Fraser,

> When a server crashes and absolutely nothing interesting is in the logs
> what  does a person do?  I generally suspect hardware problems but when
> a server  has been rock solid historically I don't put a lot of faith in
> that and in  any case it's just a guess.

I trust that the server is on a tested good UPS, so a power event is out
of the question?

Sometimes there isn't any error message in the logs that looks to be
relevant, but there might be a hint. I had a desktop with unpredictable
behavior in X, Xserver locking the system hard. there was nothing relevant
in messages, but I found a hint in the boot.log that the sound daemon
wasn't configured (I don't use sound), so I ran sndconfig and everything
worked fine after that.

So although you might not get a kern message in the messages log, there
might be a hint elsewhere. I would check the boot.log and the apache
error_log for hints.

Try Henry's suggestion of logging to a stealth machine, but I dunno if
it'll help if the kernel is freezing before being able to write to it.

HTH, good luck.

-- 
Keith Mastin
BeechTree Information Technology Services Inc.
Toronto, Canada
(416)696 6070


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