Hi,
I have FC4 loaded on an old p3 box with 256 Mb RAM, two Western Digital 20Gb drives.

i have set it up as a headless box so i can VNC into it and not have a monitor attached.

However, the issue I get is this--if i do have a monitor attached or not.

the system seems to go into sleep mode and no amount of keyboard action/mouse action will wake it up.

also, after a certain amount of time, when it does 'sleep' it will stop replying to pings.

so the only thing I can do is hard reboot.

Has anyone seen this thing before--how do i manage power settings or how do i find look through logs which might point to some kind of BIOS/ACPI/APM setting which is doing this.

Weird thing is, the screen goes blank but the monitor does not go into standby(the power light stays green).

What CPU is it specifically? What chipset?

Here are some ideas.

* Read the Fedora release notes on how to forcefully disable APM and ACPI. See if that changes anything.
* Log in using some remote shell (ssh or telnet) and run 'top' for a while to see what launches or uses large amounts of CPU - around the time you might expect this odd behavior.
* Look into '/var/log/messages' to see if there is any extra information there.
* Try booting into runlevel 3 only (no X-server) and see if changes.
* Try a newer (or older kernel) - NOTE however that this may make things worse - sometimes.

Some problems I've had in the past (which are probably totally unrelated, but just some ideas).
* Faulty BIOS which would put the computer into a odd state.
* A X-server problem which would somehow run away, ignore input and lock all input/output -- BUT the network would still work.

Thanks mjmwired.
Is there a command i can run to list components and CPU speed etc? does top do this with some switch?

The 'top' command does give some resource usage information, such as amount of cpu used, memory consumption, and most importantly the highest processes running.

If you want to see cpu information run:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
(but this is static information, as it does not change)
If you want to see your devices run:
/sbin/lspci

What you said here:
"* A X-server problem which would somehow run away, ignore input and lock all input/output -- BUT the network would still work"
seems to actually be relevant.
I get to work this morning and I can't vnc to the box--but it seems like the network card is working-i have an Apache server running on the box in question which had obviously been accepting connections from clients on our LAN. (i could see this from last logins). Did you work out how to solve the X-server problem?

As for running in level 3-would this disable apache/Mysql?

TIA

I never found the exact root cause of the problem. I had some varying success after upgrading both the bios and kernel on the system. Which may have had nothing to do with it, but reduced the problem. In the end, I guessed it was poor chipset on the motherboard and replaced the motherboard. Since then, I've never had the problem.

Using runlevel 3 will not prevent apache/mysql. Just make sure they are both enabled for runlevel 3 and 5:

# chkconfig --level 35 httpd on
# chkconfig --level 35 mysqld on

Some BIOSes have an automatic sleep feature. I had a machine do this and it was a simple matter of changing one setting in the BIOS (telling it never to put the machine in sleep mode).

Thanks guys. Checking now.
Now if this is a server and not a notebook--there shouldn't be any reason to have the apmd daemon running, should there? I can't see why it is--I didn't set it to run on install and don't remember turning it on so I'm guessing it runs by default.