system crawling....

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 01 Oct 2008, Luis Montes wrote:

> I wasn't able to authenticate on a text terminal either, so I couldn't 
> run top to see what was going on. The disks weren't really spinning much 
> either.
> 
> Then about ten minutes later something freed up, and I'm in now.  No 
> idea what it was, but with 8 x 2GHz cores and 16 gigs of ram, you'd 
> think it would be able to get through standard ubuntu init stuff without 
> issues.

Agreed.  Can you look back through /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages
during the time and see if there's anything that might indicate the source
of the issue?

One possibility might be a rogue process hogging all system RAM which
eventually might have been killed by the kernel (that kill would be
logged).  There are many more possibilities though.

> Related to my first problem though, why are the thin clients dependent 
> on the server being able to launch gdm itself? X on the server shouldn't 
> even be necessary.

As far as I know, in LTSP5 gdm is not needed.  It was in LTSP4 because gdm
was what the clients connected to.  However, as the client runs its own
display manager and starts a session over ssh, I don't think gdm running
is necessary.  Presumably you've observed something that makes you think it
is?

Gavin