Hi all,
I have a customer with an RHEL 4 system (IBM xSeries 345, machine type 8670) that is hanging. It totally freezes every now and then, with no errors in the system board's management controller logs, no displayed errors (that I can see) during POST, and no errors when PC Doctor diagnostics are run. Nothing.
The last time the customer noticed it was when he came into work on September 29th. This is part of the /var/messages log from around the time of the freeze:
Code:
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-88
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-89
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-89
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-90
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-90
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-91
Sep 27 11:40:05 stg4 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-91
Sep 27 13:09:38 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4134]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Sep 27 13:09:38 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4134]: session closed for user root
Sep 27 13:09:38 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4143]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Sep 27 13:09:38 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4143]: session closed for user root
Sep 27 13:09:39 stg4 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Sep 27 13:09:59 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[3328]: session closed for user root
Sep 27 16:52:39 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4552]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Sep 27 16:52:46 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[4552]: session closed for user root
Sep 28 10:08:39 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[5088]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Sep 28 10:08:43 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[5088]: session closed for user root
Sep 28 14:08:44 stg4 sshd(pam_unix)[5153]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Oct 3 17:18:55 stg4 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Oct 3 17:18:55 stg4 syslog: syslogd startup succeeded
Oct 3 17:18:55 stg4 kernel: klogd 1.4.1, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
...which really doesn't tell me anything. The last message before the system became inaccessible was a root login, but it doesn't appear that that user kicked off a reboot himself.
My question is: I have done some investigation into the 'modprobe' messages and have concluded that these are benign messages--yet since they are the only messages I see that concern me, I wanted to ask everyone: could they possibly have something to do with the system freeze, perhaps with corrupt sectors on the hard disk or a problem with the SCSI controller? Am I looking in the wrong place? Would seeing more of the messages log help?
Thanks in advance for your responses--I'm trying to help the customer out as quickly as I can, but this is beyond my experience.
Is 'Can't locate module block-major-xx' causing this system to crash?
question, but a 'yes' or 'no' would be good. 
