Odd machine behaviour

[Liam Proven]

On 30 November 2012 01:15, Phil Dobbin <bukowskiscat at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a AMD Athlon 2GHz box with 2 GB's of RAM running Debian Wheezy
> with all the latest patches pulled in from the repos. It runs fine
> (after the initial glitches with Gnome 3 which settled down about a
> month ago) but it has a nasty habit of just "dying". By dying I mean,
> I'll be logged into it from another machine using Byobu with tmux as the
> backend & I'll get a broken pipe error message & sure enough, when I
> cross the other side of the room, the screens gone blank (it's running X
> Windows) & the keyboard & mouse are completely unresponsive.
>
> I can see that the mouse still has life (it's an optical one) & with it
> being on a KVM switch, the light still shows activity on the switch &
> the computer tower itself has a green LED showing it's running & if I
> strain, I can still hear it running.

This is a bit beyond my level of expertise, but a couple of ideas:

* attach an actual physical keyboard to the flakey machine, and then
either or both of:

* enable X-clobbering and see if Ctrl-Alt-Backspace terminates X.org
and drops you to a console, in which case, you know it's still running
& it might be a graphics-related issue

* try the Linux system-reset key combination - if it works, that will
tell you if the kernel is still responsive

If the keyboard is USB then you can have multiple ones. I suggest a
local connection in case the issue is KVM-related; indeed, IIWY & if
possible, I'd remove the KVM for testing purposes.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884