Where's the culprit?

[Peter King]

Twice today I've had mysterious lockups on a computer that has generally
run pretty well. I outfitted it with a new gigabit ethernet card that uses
the e1000 driver, and set it up yesterday. This morning I found it locked
up completely; the last log entries were a MARK around 1:00am (figures). No
other clues. Hmm. I went to the office where the computer is installed, and
sure enough, couldn't get a console. A reboot seemed to cure the problem.

Except that it didn't. This afternoon I was updating the system via ssh when
I noticed that it was running very slow. I managed to ssh in from another
computer (while the compilation was running/frozen), and found that, of all
things, syslog-ng was using 98% of the CPU according to top. I tried to kill
it, but it would not respond to sudo /etc/init.d/syslog-ng stop (or restart);
I tried killing it via its pid but no go there, either. A few minutes later
the ssh connection was lost entirely.

Must be something in syslog-ng, I thought. So I went back to the office where
the computer is located, and upon checking the logs this time I found some
record of a kernel oops. In each case there was no sign of the trigger, but
the kernel module that seems implicated was e1000. All this under 3.0.3.

Could a kernel oops cause syslog-ng to go haywire? I can replace the ethernet
card easily enough, but I don't know whether I'm barking up the wrong tree and
should instead be looking at problems with syslog-ng instead.

Any ideas/suggestions/advice would be welcome. The system runs gentoo, and is
an old Athlon64.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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