[ubuntu-za] Problems since last round of "major" updates

[Wesley Werner]

Definitely a mind boggling!

Are these hard crashes Robin? That is, are you able to switch to a tty with
Ctrl+Alt+F1? If not, does the magic sysrq key combination work? (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key#Uses<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key>
)

The idea is you can get the output of the `dmesg` command (prints your
system log), it may contain some hints as to what is failing. If the
machine is stuck and you can't do anything but hard reset, you can still
check `dmesg` afterwards, but the issue with hard crashes is: they don't
always log errors :(  /var/log/Xorg.0.log is also a log to look at after a
crash.

Can you ssh into the crashed machine (if you have that setup) ? This will
help determine if it's a kernel hangup or just an X/Unity hang. In fact...
it may be worth trying xfce or something else (not Unity) on one of the
machines.

Usually this tactic is to rule out if it's hardware related, but running a
Live CD/USB while stress-testing it (copying files etc). I know that 3x
hardware issues is very unlikely, but not impossible. Plus it could tell us
if it is indeed a kernel issue! (If running a Live of a kernel 2.6 distro
works fine for comparison)

Another common issue if memory leaks: keep system monitor (or htop) open
and keep an eye on free memory. (Firefox had such an issue a few months
ago, caused crashes by eating all the memory over time.)

For now can you please give us the outputs of these commands: uname -a &&
cat /etc/lsb-release*

More ideas:
Do you sleep/hibernate any of these? Monitor DPMS power savings timeouts?
Did you upgrade these machines to new releases or are they clean installs?
try disabling bluetooth services if you not using them.

I've run out of suggestions for now. Good luck! :)
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