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[PLUG] Re: Unexplained system restarts - maybe the Re: Unexplained system restarts - maybe the screensaver ?
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Alas, it's neither the screensaver nor the KVM switch.
Yesterday I gloated prematurely:
Right on the money !
I had at first lamented:
Recently (since the last apt-get udate & apt-get upgrade) my debian/
sarge PC has been crashing (rebooting) from screensaver mode.
This happens if I leave the monitor on and stop all activity on
the 'puter. First, the screensaver starts up, but after a while
it times out and the animations stop. The crashes seem to happen
some time after that. This is a new occurrence, and has taken
place several times in the last two or three days.
To which Chad had ventured:
Just for sh**s & giggles, try removing the KVM / monitor sharing
switch in between. Plug the keyboard/monitor/mouse directly into
the PC and restart it. Let the SS come on and see if it crashes.
I have seen some bad KVM switches cause unexpected failures in
systems before. More often then not, it was with buying one on the
cheap side.
Leading me to conclude erroneously:
That did it. I stopped the PC and unplugged the mouse from the KVM
switch and reattached it directly to the PC. So far, the system has
run several hours OK. The Smoothwall doesn't need a mouse, as it's
run in terminal mode or through a web interface.
It's a Belkin switch; whether it's a cheepie or not, I dunno. I do
know that Belkin hasn't replied to a question about this switch and
its incompatibility with another PC, also running debian/sarge ...
I tried the mouse first because a couple of times I was in the process
of picking up the mouse in order to get it out of the way of another
mouse sharing the same pad when a couple of earlier crashes occurred.
After a while, I'll try unplugging everything and re-upping it, to
see if it's just a dirty-connection problem. It had been running
for over a year.
Now I'm typing like a madman to get this in before the next crash.
With the PC shut down, I eliminated the KVM switch entirely from the
circuit (except that the Smoothwall is still blindly chugging along
and passing all this through its green & red NIC's) and found that
the PC would still crash ... once while I was eating dinner, so that
I couldn't watch it ... and again, about 18 hours later, just after
I started to print a report, which thankfully I had saved both in
OpenOffice format and as a PDF file. The printer stopped during
the reboot but carried on afterwards just fine, restarting the print
process after one messed-up page.
I looked at the "PC Health Status" and find normal-looking voltages,
all except -5V which shows omonously as "none," although I vaguely
remember that as always being the case.
Looking at /var/log/dmesg, I see the following off-putting lines:
vesafb: probe of vesafb0 failed with error -6
This link puts that one to rest: http://kerneltrap.org/node/5054
and in another place:
usblp: probe of 1-1:1.0 failed with error -5
This link eliminates that as well:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/09/msg00155.html
Where next to look ?
George Langford
george@georgesbasement.com
___________________________________________________________________________
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