[RLUG] System freeze

[James Washer]

One of the best simple test for life is to hit the caps-lock key, and see if the caps-lock LED comes on.. If it doesn't.. the box is in pretty sad shape.

 - jim

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:36:29 -0700
Ben Johnson <ben at blarg.net> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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