[RLUG] System freeze

[Ben Johnson]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 10:16:16AM -0700, Dennis Bagley wrote:
> 
> Ideas?  Recommendations?

it may only be X freezing up on you.  sometimes ctrl+alt+f1 or
ctrl+alt+bckspc works to get out of a frozen X session.

maybe some process on the box has found a way to use all userspace
processing cycles.  icmp packets are handled at a very low level in the
OS...  so often when a system isn't responsive and can't even be
connected to with ssh, it will still respond to pings.  that's a good
test.

keyboard events, I think, are also handled at a very low level but if X
is frozen then you won't see any echo.  need a console for that.

are you getting any messages in the logs that might give a clue?
sometimes you'll see a kernel oops.  when my laptop crashes because of
my windows nic driver I see in the logs messages about about packets
that are too large.  or disk read errors/timeouts...  stuff like that.

I hear compiling a kernel is a good way to test memory.  if your
compiler segfaults (sig11), you probably have a bad stick.  I've heard
this can be more reliable then memtest programs.

- Ben