[TriLUG] random re-boots

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Jeff Patterson wrote:

>Greetings Fellow Tri-luggers!
>I seem to be having a small problem of trouble shooting my desktop. 
>For some reason, it reboots at random during the middle of the day. 
>I've checked my logs and the most helpful thing I can find is:
>
>Jan 17 09:01:00 silk CROND[1839]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts
>/etc/cron.hourly)
>Jan 17 09:24:42 silk shutdown: shutting down for system reboot
>
>I can't seem to find anything that would cause this.  I don't see any
>failed login attempts and this machine is behind the firewall.  I know
>the MB is a bit flakey, but I'm trying to isolate the issue before I
>go out and by another MB.  BTW- I'm running MDK 9.x.  The box is a bit
>old, but until recently, I haven't had any problems at all.  Thanks in
>advance for any help I can get!
>
>regards,
>jeff
>  
>
If this problem were hardware related - for example a motherboard 
causing the system to lock up or reboot, you certainly wouldn't get an 
messages about shutdown being written by syslog.  If I had to take my 
guess, you've got some service / running program that's taking a nose 
dive, and voluntary rebooting the system - something with root 
privileges, which should help narrow it done some.  You might be best 
served by leaving it alone for a few hours, waiting for it to reboot, 
turning off a service or two, waiting for it to reboot, etc. until the 
reboots go away.  You can then inspect more closely the last few 
services that you disabled, to see what may be wrong with them.

Best of luck in chasing the weird issue!
Aaron S. Joyner