Hello,

If anyone can help me with this I'd appreciate any pointers.

I have an HP Proliant Microserver which I've installed CentOS 6.2 on and am working my way through my RHCSA training using it as the host for various VM guests. The server has been working reliably since January but in the last week has been crashing most days and today it's crashed 2 times in as may hours and I've hit a brick wall trying to identify the root cause. I can't be sure of this but it tends to crash when I've been using the mouse. The mouse locks up and after 10/15 seconds it crashes.

Diagnosis action so far include:
Un-installing the last yum updates
Booting from a previous kernel

I'm getting vmcore files for each crash but have spent a couple hours this morning trying to figure out how to analyse this I'm no further forward. The debug tools aren't on my server and the instructions I've read online for example don't work

Example:

At this stage the only viable option I have is to rebuild the whole server and all VM guests which will take some time and coming from a UNIX admin background I'd like to diagnose this (as would be the case in a prod environment) rather than give up and take the easy, yet time consuming, option. Unfortunately I've reached the limit of my knowledge and my search online has proved fruitless.

Although I'd like to get the debug stuff working, I do wonder, at my level, if I'll be able to make much sense or implement any solutions from the results.

Gareth

Make sure its not a hardware problem, run a memtest and hdd diagnostics. Is there anything on the screen when it crashes? An oops message for example

Thanks for the advise, I've run a memory test as suggested and no fault was found. I managed to use the server the rest of the day without issue then it dawned on me that every time it had crashed I had been changing the firewall settings to test the routing between my VM guests. I thought I'd see if I could test this and have just made a few more changes to the firewall again and the server crashed, so this could well be the cause.

I've googled 'firewall centos crash' and a few variations. There wasn't much out there but I did find couple related threads but nothing on Centos v6 and no solutions. Does anyone know enough about Centos/Linux to advise if this could be the cause and how I go about proving it? If there is a bug is it worth reporting as I've reported bugs before and they've not even been looked at?

You should try to disable the firewall to confirm it is that