Diagnostic tools for tracking down machine freeze

[David McGlone]

On Sunday 25 October 2009 19:10:21 Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Sunday 25 October 2009 22:25, D. R. Evans wrote:
> > Nigel Henry said the following at 10/25/2009 03:02 PM :
> > > I've always had the odd freeze up on this new machine of mine, but
> > > mainly with some distros, like Archlinux for example. But now I'm
> > > getting frequent freezeups on Kubuntu Dapper, and Debian Etch was
> > > freezing up after about 5 mins.
> > >
> > > I've been running Dappers Memtest86+ v1.70 for over 10hrs now. 14
> > > passes done with no errors, so the memory appears to be ok, and the
> > > machine hasn't locked up.
> > >
> > > This machine is on a KVM switch with another machine which is
> > > infrequently booted up. Are KVM switches known for creating such
> > > freezeups?
> > >
> > > Any suggestions as to diagnostic tools I could use to try and track
> > > down the problem?
> >
> > Are you running lmsensors?
>
> It's only running on one of the distros on the machine (9 distros on it),
> so that I could see if Gkrellm would display the cpu temp. Just checked on
> Hardy, which hasn't frozen yet, and lmsensors is not installed.
>
> > If so, remove it and any modules it loads.
> >
> > It took me a year of intermittent freezes to figure out that that was the
> > problem on one of my machines.
>
> I'll keep that in mind.
>
> > I have used a KVM switch for years; I've never known it cause a freeze.
> > (I have, though, occasionally fingered it as responsible for getting a
> > system into such a confused state that I've ended up rebooting; I've
> > learned now not to switch amongst my machines [I have four on the switch]
> > when I'm booting or closing down one of them.)
>
> Thanks for the feedback on the KVM switch question.
>
> Could the problem be clock related. I ask because I checked the clock in
> the BIOS, and it was 2hrs ahead of UTC. I reset it to UTC, rebooted Hardy,
> and it showed the correct time of UTC +1 (CET) clocks changed last night in
> France to add to the confusion from CEST to CET. Just rebooted, and checked
> in the BIOS, and clock shows time being saved correctly as UTC.
>
> I think I'll have to check all the distros clocks on this machine, as I
> know one of them messes the time up, and when I boot up a different distro,
> it shows it 2 hrs ahead, until ntp sets it correctly.
>
> Darn. I've just noticed that Hardy has frozen up 3mins ago, and it had only
> been up and running for about 10mins. Weird eh.

Have you tried disabling visual effects and see if the problem persist?

Blessings
David M.