[TriLUG] Odd problem with RH8.0 box

[Peter Long]

Yikes, I hope that is not it! I don't see any errors reported by fsck 
either. I have a spare PCI IDE controler I could try instead of the 
onboard one.

I recently installed APCUPSD to monitor my APS Back-UPS ES. I wonder if 
it could be messing with the APC stuff causing the disks to be powered 
down. How would I check if that is that case...

--
Peter Long

Jon Carnes wrote:
> I second Jason's theory. I've run into that exact problem before with
> boxes having disk problems.
> 
> When booting, does the fsck show any bad sectors or problems that it
> can't fix?
> 
> Jon
> 
> On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 21:51, Jason Tower wrote:
> 
>>it sounds like a problem with either the hard drive or the disk 
>>controller.  anything that accesses the disk is hanging.  unlike 
>>logins, mail, ssh, etc, routing and iptables don't generally require 
>>disk access once they're loaded into memory so they aren't failing.
>>
>>of course, that's just my opinion, i could be wrong.
>>
>>jason
>>
>>On Wednesday 28 January 2004 21:38, Peter Long wrote:
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>I have been experiencing an intermittent problem with my trusty Linux
>>>box. Unfortunately I can't figure out the cause. The machine is
>>>running RedHat 8.0 and is a PII 350 with 384MB of RAM. It also has
>>>more then enough RAM. The box serves as my gateway to the Internet.
>>>It has two NICs and I am running IP Tables on it. I also use it as my
>>>mail server.
>>>
>>>The symptoms of the problem are that every now and then it seems to
>>>"lock up". By that I mean that I cannot login at the console, neither
>>>via X or tty. The funny thing is that it still works fine as a
>>>router. My internal machines can still send traffic through it after
>>>it has locked up. At first I thought it was a problem with PAM since
>>>it locked up when I tried to login. Incidently IMAP from remote
>>>machines would also stop working as well as new SSH connections.
>>>Named also stops responding. I tried testing my theory that it was a
>>>PAM problem by leaving one tty console logged in after rebooting the
>>>system. However when the problem re-occurred I discovered that I
>>>could not do an 'ps' at the bash prompt. So it seems that you cannot
>>>launch new processes either.
>>>
>>>There are no funny errors in the logs to indicate what the problem
>>>could be. Actually it seems to stop writing to the log entirely. I
>>>usually get an entry in the 'messages' log every 30 minutes from
>>>iptables for BOOTP traffic that is dropped. These stop occurring.
>>>
>>>It does not seem to be a disk space or ram problem. I have gig free
>>>and 230MB of the 384MB is unused.
>>>
>>>Any clues or tips would be greatly appreciated.
>>>
>>>--
>>>Peter Long
> 
>