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if it happens again try killing magicdev.
Fred
----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Allan Lucas <eric.allan.lucas@mail.com>
To: PLUG List <plug@phillylinux.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2000 7:53 AM
Subject: [PLUG] Postmortem
> I had a strange occurence with my Linux workstation and I was wondering if
anyone could advise me on how to determine what happened (therefore - how to
prevent a repeat).
>
> The computer is a 200 MHz MMX pentium - 64 Meg RAM and an 18 GB SCSI hard
drive (there are several other ide drives - mostly old windows stuff). It's
running Red Hat 6.1 with the latest Helix-Gnome update.
>
> I walked into the office about 8:15 last evening and the disk access light
is going steadily - I can hear a drive working.
> The X screen saver is frozen and V E R Y slowly starts to paint the unlock
password box when I move the mouse. There is not discernable network
traffic so it's all internal and it's obviously _very_ busy. I switch to a
console and after 2 tries (others time out after 60 seconds) manage to log
in as root.
>
> At this point I want to run top or ps but nothing works - bus error for
everything. I type "cat /proc/meminfo" and I see something like this:
>
> total: used: free:
> Mem: 64573440 64573440 0
> Swap: 139821056 139821056 0
>
> At this point I just want my workstation back to do some work so I try the
reboot command... It gives me the buserror message but still manages to work
well enough to get the box rebooted. After this, everything appears normal.
I poked around in the /var/log directory looking for clues and the only
thing I find is 160 of these strange messages at the end of the dmesg file:
>
> VFS: Disk change detected on device ide1(22,64)
>
> My conclusion is that some process "ran away", consuming all available
memory, including swap. Maybe it was triggered by some hardware glitch on
the ide1 port (SWAG *)? The problem is I don't know how to find out which
process it was, why it happend, or most importantly, how to prevent it (if
possible) in the future.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Does anybody have suggestions about handling a situation like this? Was I
too quick on the reboot command?
>
> Any advice is appreaciated (except the advice to buy myself a better
computer... that's already in the works :-) )
>
> Thanks
> Eric Lucas
>
> * SWAG -> Scientific Wild Ass Guess !
>
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>
> ______________________________________________________________________
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>
>
______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group - http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
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