Down Time
 

OK ... Strange thing happend to my BSD machine this night...

While doing some things, I heard a strange sound (sounded like "BuunngK") Monitor went black, (flash of light kinda sorta) and than i noticed that it sounded like the HDD was not spinning (normaly very loud on this computer) I (God only knows why) hit the on button, which i noticed was not green ... its normal state. NO light in fact. The normal sounds came back, but not the monitor. I quick checked IRC, it was up and running, seemingly no interuption, same with web pages. I ssh into the BSD, and i get in no probs, BUT all X applications and X its self are not running. I check dmesg and i got

BSDWolf# dmesg
wakeup from sleeping state (slept 00:00:23)
pid 755 (Xorg), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
BSDWolf#

Ok ... so the computer went into sleep mode, only thing i can figure out is, that the video card fried, went ... what ever, causeing the computer to enter sleep mode, which would be why the sounds went away. If any one has any other Theories, please post here.

In the mean time, first thing ill do is plug this monitor into another pc, see if its good or not ... just to use the prossess of elemination. If it works, than ill have to assume i was right about the video card, and replace that... if it does not work... well ... ill swap it out and see what happens.

I wont do this for another few days and i promice to try to keep the down time to a minimum. As of right now the computer seems to be working and all services are up and active. Only thing that seems to be the matter is that i can not use the comptuer directly, have to ssh or telnet into it to use it my self. So this at least gives me some time, and i wont have to turn it off for long.

WOLFGAR :hat:

Re: Down Time/UPDATE
 

I swaped out the VIDEO Card today, and whola got video again.

XOrg still does not work, that is mainly because xorg.conf has to be edited still with the specs of the new card, which because is an old reused card, i dont have... :-(

When i try to run xorgcfg the computer freezes up.
Blackspyder (one of our newer chatters) told me tonight that i need to enter into the BIOS and disable the onboard card (DOH i really did know that, why didnt i think of it before he did? Dont get old, it sux...) So i will do that tommorrow, and than try xorgcfg again. If that does not work... i may have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand... which will not be pleasant.

one other option is to run xorgconf (not this command is not the same as the above) does what xorgcfg does, but with out the gui... problem is it will reconfigure everything, and to be honest im not willing to redo the entire system if i dont have too ... only the video has changed. Doing it this way its just more easy to make a mistake, and mess things up even more.

Certainly the smart thing to do is to backup my xorg.conf as it is now, cause at least that one is working ... at least i have command prompt atm

WOLFGAR

Re: Down Time/ New Development
 

Ok, i let the pc run over night, as it stood, (read previouse posts to see what that means) The computer froze up ... I restarted it when i discovered this, Went into the bios, only option there was to select if i wanted the computer to check the onboard cards first or the pci slots first, it already had PCI selected ... so now im at a loss.
ran fsck -y and fsck -p just because ...
running fsck -y did not give me the results i expected, and fsck -p would not run at all, gave the error warning UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY. I will ... i dont expect things to get any better.

The HDD is the newest part of this PC, i purchased that brand new... the rest of the pc is salvaged/second hand parts. that does not rule out the HDD as being the problem, but it does not explain why the other problems...

I could still edit the xorg.conf by hand, and see if that helps. Thing is, i was not running xorg, it wont start so i cant run it... yet the pc froze up, no reason for that. If the file was not running/ or has not been called up, it should not be the cause of the Freezing up.

Im thinking that the motherboard is on its way out. The video card is on the board, and that did fry already, now the freezeing ... seems to me we are headed toward catasophic system shutdown/system failoire. I am going to start backing up all the files on this machine asap.

While writting this, im running the fsck manually, in phase 1, i see /dev/ad0s1f (NO WRITE) last mounted on /usr ... sounds like the HDD may be on its way out ... hmmmm first the video card, now the hdd ... consistant with catastrophic system fail ... but why?

I have enough parts laying around that i can build another pc... what i dont have is another HDD ... if one is needed... any one have an offer?

I will do what i can to keep services up and running as long as i can until i can get this all fixed up. If I get all the parts i do need to make a new server, i will naturaly start with a fresh install of BSD, apache, our chat server ... so on and so forth, so we will be most up to date...

WOLFGAR

Re: Down Time
 

Went to undernet (shuder) #freebsd, probably one of the only 3 channels on that dang network worth while going to ...

There they told me that fsck is much more effective to run in single user mode ... did as they instructed, and whola things got a bit better... in the least the pc would run again...in command prompt.

The computer ran about 8 - 12 hours, and than froze up again... in #freebsd some speculations went around, the one that makes the most sence to me... Heat !

Heat would explain all of the issues: Video card going suddenly with no warning, PC freezing up ... Saturday I will open the computer up, clean out all the dust, check the fans, pull the cpu, reapply thermo paste and see what happens next.

thing that bothers me with this explaination, if heat was the reason for all of this, wouldnt the pc freeze up sooner? I mean, i find it frozen after a few hours and reboot it ... so wouldnt it still be rather warm, and freeze up much sooner ???

Another sugestion was intermitant problems with the Power Supply ... somehow that does not sound right to me though ... what do any of you (Assuming that someone is actualy reading this) Think ?

WOLFGAR :hat

Re: Down Time/updates
 

Ok ... 8:15 pm now ... restarting the computer, its frozen again.

Best i can make out, it ran for about 10 - 14 hours before Freezing up this time. I had to reboot it late last night, and it was running fine this morning beore I left for work... but by the time my wife went to get on line this morn, she noticed that the web pages were down, ... that was somewhere around noonish she says ... you Try to get an acruate time out of a woman !

Heat is starting to seem less likely the problem, if the computer was hot, and froze up because of that, it would freeze up much sooner upon a reboot...

Must be a configuration thang, keep im mind, i did switch out the video card, but made no changed to any files...

Any Sugestions anyone?

WOLFGAR :hat

Re: Down Time
 

I would suggest changing out the power supply. It's relatively easy, and it could help you eliminate an unknown.

Re: Down Time
 

ThankYoiu for the input... it is worth considering.

As far as the ease of replaycing a PS, yes, i agree ... being A+ certified, changing parts is one of the most easy things I have to do ... as in any thing else, diognostics is where it gets to be a b*tch...

The thing that gets to me is that the computer will run aprox 7 - 10 hours ( i finnly have it narrowed down that far, and hope to narrow it down to an exact time frame) and than freeze. If it were PS i would imagine id get a reboot, or a shutdown. It is true that if the PS was giving us a drop in power, that a pc may freeze, but that would not be at such a consistant rate of time ... ie: if it were voltage dropage, it would be much more random than it is now.

I have dug through my parts, and found a nice Del MB, P4 2.5 ... I am going to start building that pc as time allows, put in one of my smaller but known good HDDs in it, install a version of windblows and let that run for a few days while I ...
dl the most up to date version of FreeBSD, Apache, RatBox, so on and so forth
If the computer runs stable for that few days to one week, install our currant HDD, install all the new stuff and start fresh,
the only part that will be reused is the HDD, keyboard and monitor. If the new pc shows teh same symptoms, than we will know for sure that it is the HDD. If the pc runs fine, leave it run.

Ill than start to rebuild the currant hdd, useing the test hdd with windblows on it from the other one... see if it runs stable for a few days ... or not. If not, try to figure the problem out and correct it... if it does run stable, ill have to assume it was a software issue. At this point, Ill use that second hdd to mirror our first, and than use it for weekly backups of our server... this way next time we run into problems, we have a backup machine so we experience NO DownTime !

WOLFGAR

Re: Down Time
 

I have a spare 40gb IDE HD and several sticks of 512 pc3200 ram if you need it.

Re: Down Time
 

:Can always use the hardware. The Ram would certainly help to eleminate RAM as the issue...

And HDD space is always helpful.

Thankyou for the offer... I and WolfChat.org appreciate it :-)

WOLFGAR :hat

Re: Down Time/UpTime
 

I reinstalled FreeBSD, This time 7.0 along with Unreal 3.2.7, Anope 1.7.21 and Apache 2.2.6.

Th e latest, newest and supposed best of each software.

The computer still experiances some freezing, but by far much less often. I have closed up as many of the security issues as i could find.

In the mean time, StormWolf donated a Harddrive and some ram. Haze donanated a PIII 500 made by Gateway, and some extra harddrives as well.

With in the next two weeks, as i can find the time, my Wife's health permitting, I will rebuild again ... useing the new hardware. This time, I will use FreeBSD 6.2 Stable, as it is the last known PROVEN OS from FreeBSD with out any issues. I will do all i can to keep the currant machine up and running, until the new one is ready :-)

WOLFGAR :hat

Re: Down Time
 

Well it is great to see the server up and running again, was afraid it had disappeared for good. I do hope to see you all around either here or the IRC Chat.

-Steve