[GTALUG] mysterious restarts

[Russell Reiter]

On 6/14/16, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> We have a computer that started doing random and frequent restarts on the
> weekend.  We don't know why.
>
> Any suggestions?

You don't mention whether or not the system is protected by UPS.

I live in an area with somewhat spotty electrical service, an older
building near the exhibition grounds. When they liven up the CNE
grounds in the spring, I experience brown-outs quite often.

Most recently the city has replaced the streetcar overhead wires and
de-energized and re-energized the system, both times I had spontaneous
reboots. One of the TTC engineers told me the new streetcars require
more voltage and they are replacing the wires with heavier gauge ones
throughout the city.

Are you near streetcar tracks where they may be replacing wiring or
perhaps near one of the transformers which convert AC to DC?


>
> It looks as if the power dips momentarily and the computer reboots,
> with no message that we have observe.  But it could just as easily be
> a crash of some other kind that leaves no trace.
>
> The system is an HP Compaq Pro 6300 Small Form Factor PC running
> Fedora 20.
>
> The crash seems to be at different points (i.e. not one consistent
> software activity).  The crashes don't seem correlated with heavy
> workloads (eg. it crashed a couple of times while I was staring at log
> files to see if there was any hint of the problem).
>
> Hypothesis: a Fedora 20 bug.  But the software has not been changed in
> months.  Updates have not been appled this year.  Since the behaviour
> has changed without the software changing, I don't think that Fedora
> is to blame.
>
> Hypothesis: it might be heat-related (the room it is in gets warm).  I
> vacuumed out the interior and defuzzed the heat sinks.  This did not
> improve the uptime.
>
> Hypothesis: it might be contact-related.  So I disconnected and
> reconnected most internal connectors and reseated the memory.
> This did not seem to improve the uptime.
>
> Hypothesis: it might be the power supply.  Normally, I'd swap power
> supplies to test this hypothesis but this Small Form Factor computer
> has a unique (and probably expensive) power supply.  I opted to move
> the disk to a Dell OptiPlex 990 Small Form Factor computer and use that.
>
> The Dell, with the HP's disk, seems stable.  No rebooting.  This is in
> the same warm room, but the weather has changed.
>
> In the original HP box, I installed a disk that I had laying around (a
> 60G drive from a discarded laptop), installed Ubuntu 16.04, and have
> been running four CPU-bound processes for 24 hours.  No crash.  I
> admit that this is in a cooler room.  The heat and power load of a
> laptop drive is less than that of a 3.5" HDD, but I would not think
> that that is significant.
>
> The computer is a couple of years old but still has a year of
> warranty.  There are confidential files on the disk drive so I'd like
> to narrow down the problem before calling in HP support.  Asking for a
> particular replacement part is more convenient that shipping the
> computer back to HP.
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