Re: [PLUG] what the hell is my computer doing?

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 10:16:20AM -0400, Greg Lopp wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 09:40:21AM -0400, William Shank wrote:
> > i'm running mandrake 8. i came in this morning and my harddrive is going
> > nuts and the interface is completely unusable. it takes 5 minutes just to
> > get the screen lock prompt to accept my password. i figure it was indexing
> > the drive or something, but after a half hour it doesn't stop. i try to log
> > in at another tty, but tire from waiting for the password prompt. also,
> > there is an out of memory error and it says it killed a process (java -
> > which is probably the Forte IDE i left running). i can't get the system to
> > respond so i can see a process list. i finally try to reboot, (3 finger
> > salute) but the system continues to hang attempting to shutdown. i finally
> > have to reset it. 

I've had something like this happen to me twice on RH systems. I've
never quite figured it out, but I found a couple things that were
interesting:

- apparently there was a late 2.2 kernel that still had a bug in
  it that could present this way.

- some netscape versions have been known to go wild and hog cpu, but
  not quite as bad as you describe

- on rare occasion (happens to me about twice a year) XFree86
  dies. When this happens, it's bad, and the hole machine appears
  frozen, although I can usually ssh in from another machine.

That's a very long "I don't know", but fwiw.


Ultimately, top would be a useful tool. If it happens often enough,
maybe you could leave top running in a script session so you could
play it back after reboot.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>



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