Dell PowerEdge 1900sc freezing overnight

[Adam McGreggor]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 12:45:38AM +0100, Tom Bamford wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm having problems with a Dell Poweredge 1900sc server recently 
> converted to Ubuntu server 6.06 from Win2k. Although the system is 
> performing beyond expectations as a web/mail/file server, twice now it 
> has simply frozen overnight.

Ouch.

Have you just got the one 1900sc running (of the same build-date/age)
Server?

> Looking at the system/kernel logs hasn't revealed anything, there is 
> nothing out of the ordinary at around or just before the crash time, and 
> nothing else recorded in the logs until the machine is rebooted the next 
> morning.

I take it you've included dmesg(8) outputs in your checks.

> Symptoms of the crash are that the local monitor goes blank, 
> keyboard and mouse appear to be dead, no network services are working 
> (Apache, Samba, Openssh etc). The system does however answer to ping 
> requests. The only solution seems to be a hard reset.

Is anything else on the circuit? Are the boxen connected to a UPS -- if
so, have you tested that? -- try and rule out electrical faults if you
can.

> Where else can I look other than the logs in /var/log to try and find 
> out what is causing this?

Have you looked in the machines' CMOS settings, for anything annoying
like Power-Management, disk-shut downs, that sort of thing?

I'd be inclined to whack on some monitoring software, and see if that
reports anything. Failing that, it may be worth running tcpdump(8)...

HTH

a