So my desktop just randomly decided to hard-lock just now while using it. I was in my GNOME session on Edgy and just as I am moving the mouse, the cursor stopped dead in its tracks and the screen froze. None of the lights on the keyboard would respond and I couldn't even SSH into the machine; only a hard-reboot pulled it out.
I know that there are about a million different things that could cause a computer to crash so I won't ask "why did it crash?"... but as I was trying to figure out why it might have crashed, I checked my /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog and noticed something interesting. After the time when the crash occured--and before the time when I rebooted--I saw a long line of random ASCII characters. In 'messages' it was just a loooong line of escape ("^@") characters, and in 'syslog' it was that plus what seems like an almost random string of tags. Here's a brief excerpt:
Code:
<BF><FA>g<A8><B2><ED>w<9F>zj<D2>~[@w<B4><D0><F9><D5>?<85><FA>6މ<EA><A9>I;W<C5>
<E1>4<B4><D0><F9><D5>?<85><FA>6މ<AA><8E>t^Zo^K<E8><8E>^V:<BF><FA>g<A8><B2><ED>w
<9F>ڳ<B0><ED><B7>^HtD^K<9D>_<FD><D3>[<D3>.:<CE>^AW<88><BB>h^W<E8><82>^V:<BF><FA>
<A7>[<CD>^<BA>^Lw<AF>AǴ<D0><F9><D5>?<8F>n<D4>|P^S<E8><98>^V:<BF><FA><E7>э<9A>O
<D9><E7>tR<9F>Jj<ED>)&h<9C>^V:<BF><FA><E7><E5>r<E9><B4>#^TT<93>
The entire line actually spans a few screens/pages. Also, the event(s) preceding the time of the crash appeared to be non-incidental; the previous event was more than 10 minutes before the crash and was just a CRON job.
Any pointers on what this might and might-not be? It's a big deal to me when Linux crashes and I want to at least figure out if this is software, hardware, or a configuration problem.
Thanks!
). Bad RAM can also cause things like that. I've run Edgy on my machine for quite a while now, my machine's even slightly overclocked and never had any such trouble with it.
