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Hi folks
I have encountered a perplexing problem and have run out of fresh ideas to try, so would welcome some input please.
I am running Slack 9.0 on an AMD Athlon 2.4, 256MB RAM, using an ASRock mobo.
To provide a history of events:
I had the box up and running for about 3 months continuously when one morning I discovered that it had hard frozen with the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock LEDs on. Nothing I could do would clear it and so I had to do a hard shutoff (i.e. pull the plug). When I rebooted, the machine was fine (quick boot up, and using reiserfs seems to allow a really quick recovery of threads) and the machine ran fine for a few days.
Now about 3 times in the last 5 days in the mornings I have found that the box is off and cannot be restarted unless I first disconnect the main power supply plug and plug it back in. Again, after this it will start just fine and no other apparent problems.
Attempted solutions:
Thinking that it might be heat related I have checked all the fans (it runs a heatsink, an exhaust fan, an intake fan, and the PSU is a dual-fan job) and then as an added precaution I removed the side panelling last night and made sure that it had plenty of air circulation. Still was shut off this a.m. If it is heat, that does surprise me though because it ran fine during the summer but now it is failing in the winter during the hours when the automatic central heating is off.
The problem is definitely not with the mains power because every other electrical time display, for example, is still accurate - no surges or dips.
So, I am out of ideas. I was wondering if I might have a misconfigured crontab running, or that when it does its 4 am database updates it is shutting the thing down, but I can't profess to understand (a) how that would work nor (b) if that is the problem how to fix it.
simple way to tell when it's shutting down, relating to cron anyway is to either touch or log a file every 5 minutes or so, that will tell you if it's around your update times. you may also want to log you power readings overnight.. aside from that, someone will come along with more specific ideas..
Thanks for your response.
I don't know how to log my power readings having never had to do so before. Could you give me a steer on how to do that please.
you said you could check your power ? if so what command/program do u use, or is it a multimeter?
also send your cron file so i know what it is doing
add a line to cron to touch /var/power_on every ten minutes
(man cron) will explain that procedure if not ask about it.
you can then do ls la on /var and find the last modified time of power_on to find out when the system chrashed
what devices are physically plugged into your power supply.
also send output of "ps -ef" right before you leave the system so we know whats running when you leave it..
About a week ago I posted this particular problem to this board. I subsequently replaced my PSU and have been running continuously for the last 6 days. Thanks for your input. Unexplained shut-downs can be caused by a faulty PSU.
ok you folks seem to know something about this shutdown-thing....I wonder if there's any help for me?
I'm using an old machine, 566 Celefon, but it has worked fine until this. I used to have redhats installed, and with them there was no problem - for example, redhat9 used to automatically power off when I shut my machine down (I didn't need to touch the power button myself).
Now when I have gentoo, things go like this: reboot works fine. Halt or shutdown, no matter which I use, run a good shutdown: end the processes, log users out etc. (the normal stuff), but when it comes down to the line where reads "Power down" (or was it "off" ?), nothing happens. I think this should also turn the power off itself, but I need to push the button for about 6 seconds to get it completely shut down - so it's like the machine wouldn't run the WHOLE shutdown right?
How could I change this so that the power would go off itself? Please help if you can...
My ignorance knows no bounds ... so take this with salt
I figure that it has something to do with having apm installed (I think apm => advanced powered management). I get the same thing with my trusty Slack box. To all intents and purposes from the software point-of-view your box is off.
As to how you would fix it, again poll for input but I suspect that you may have to load an apm module and compile it into your kernel.
But - you know my disclaimer :-D
Hope it works out for you.
Originally posted by tireseas About a week ago I posted this particular problem to this board. I subsequently replaced my PSU and have been running continuously for the last 6 days. Thanks for your input. Unexplained shut-downs can be caused by a faulty PSU.
You might find that the old PSU will work fine on other motherboards. ASRock M/B seem to be tempermental things. 99% of my PC problems went away when I dumped my ASRock.
That's interesting: I really wasn't aware of that. Un/fortunately it was on a special deal so I made an investment. After installation, my machine was temperamental in terms of overheating issues (carrying a 2.4 Athlon) despite several pretty kick-ass fans. I wonder if that could also be attributed to the ASRock.
What kinds of issues did you deal with and what mobo are you using now??
ok... I checked out "modprobe apm" output, which was nothing but how do I go on now? I checked out
modprobe -l | grep apm
and here's what it gave me:
/lib/modules/..(cutoff)../kernel/apm.o
so this means that I can load it without recompiling my kernel, right? how do I do this, so that the module gets loaded always (so I don't have to always load it)? is "insmod" the tool I need?
Originally posted by tireseas After installation, my machine was temperamental in terms of overheating issues (carrying a 2.4 Athlon) despite several pretty kick-ass fans. I wonder if that could also be attributed to the ASRock.
What kinds of issues did you deal with and what mobo are you using now??
Same CPU here. I had overheating as well (or at least it REPORTED that it was overheating.. maybe the sensors were not working properly). The same CPU is now in a gigabyte M/B and works fine.
I had a lot of issues with powering up. Sometimes nothing would happen when the power button was pressed. Sometimes it would power up but nothing else would happen (lights ok, no POST, no text). Often it would POST but froze up if any USB devices were plugged in.
If it booted ok (dual w!n98se/RH9) some times USB devices weren't detected by either OS. I had a USB2.0 5port PCI card plugged in as well, and that worked well. just the built-in USB were the problem.
Couldn't boot from USB floppy even though the option was there in BIOS and the drive works on other PCs. The drive was detected; it would report the floppy disk wasn't bootable.
The system would suddenly freeze up under 98 and rh9. Totally locked. Even the reset button wouldn't work. Had to unplug the power cord....
There's more that I can't recall now, but I changed over to the gigabyte (everything else was exactly the same.. CPU, RAM etc) and now everything works fine. I tried a different PSU on the ASRock with no luck. The PSU I was using works fine on the new M/B and an old AOpen M/B.
The gigabyte is a GA-7VM400MF uATX. Not the flashiest AMD-compatible but works
The only thing I liked about the ASRock was the BIOS.
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