random restarts?
 

I usually leave my computer on 24 hrs a day. Lots of times I'll leave it on with Firefox open connected to the net. Recently I have noticed usually over nite or getting back from work when I go to my computer I'm greeted with the login screen. And when I restart Firefox it gives me the dialog box to restore my previous session because it closed unexpectedly.

I figure If I'm greeted with the login screen either it rebooted or just logged out suddenly. This usually happens overnite and at least once a day sometimes twice.

Anybody have similar experience?

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Are you sure it's not a hardware problem?

I thought it might be a power management or screensaver issue.
Didn't think it could be a hardware issue. What hardware could cause these symptoms?

It could be a power supply issue, seeing as you leave your computer on overnight all the time. Swap it for another one and see if it still restarts randomly.

Motherboard, Processors, RAM, Power Supply, etc.

Basically, anything that would send an error to the kernel that the system needs to reboot because of an uncorrectable problem.

Could even be an overheating issue because of a faulty fan.

You're going to have to just dig in and do some troubleshooting at this point to narrow it down.

• Take a quick case and proc fan inventory to ensure that they are all spinning up to proper rpm. Maybe even spend 15 min cleaning out the dust that has gathered in the machine.
  
• Take a look at your /var/log/messages files to see if you can determine what exactly was happening at the time of reboot.
  
• Also, if you're running the smartd service, it might point you to the potentially failing hardware devices.

Those are the places that I'd start if it were my machine.

Well apparently this issue has been discussed to death on ubuntuforums.org. This message on my /var/log/syslog file:

"Apr 2 07:36:00 newbie-desktop syslogd 1.4.1#18ubuntu6: restart."

is merely the syslogd service restarting not my computer.

Now why I'm receiving these messages when I'm not using the computer:

"Apr 1 14:55:39 newbie-desktop gconfd (newbie-29525): Received signal 15, shutting down cleanly
Apr 1 14:55:43 newbie-desktop gconfd (newbie-29525): Exiting"

And what is killing the gdm daemon randomly I suspect may have to do with the gnome-screensaver. Several posts on ubuntuforums have said not using "random" for the screensaver or using the option "blank" have stopped the random gdm crashes. I'm going to try some of these options overnight and see what happens.

Here is a link to one such post:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...random+restart

Any input appreciated.

most of the time when computers restart out of the blue its a heat problem.

there is loads of software that can monitor that so you can check the logs for detailed information

Well I have had the gnome-screensaver set to "blank" and not random. And I haven't been greeted by the login screen. I'm going to set my gnome-screensaver to something else and see the results. But something about the screensaver running for a long time is killing my gnome sessions. Maybe it's memory issue. I have a old ATI integrated video card with only 4 MB's of ram. Maybe be X is killing for that?
Interesting.

How about using uptime to confirm that it's really rebooting. (Seems questionable after reading this thread.)

It's not my computer rebooting I figured that out. It's the fact that if I leave my gnome-screensaver on over nite on "random"(haven't tested other screensaver options yet) gdm is killed and I'm left at the login display.
I'm just wondering if it could be the one particular screensaver from the "random" option is consuming too much cpu resources or memory and it's forcing X to kill gdm and thus logging off.
I haven't really found a reason for this in the ubuntuforums yet.

Random Restarts
 

I have the same symptom as nick623. I'm running Fedora Core 6, automatically updated overnight via yum. I leave this box on all the time. Lately I've come in in the morning to find the one and only user i log on as, logged off. The value of "uptime" is 14 days, so it's certainly not the case that there's been a power outage or my computer has rebooted.

In all the cases I've investigated, these few lines appear in /var/log/messages:

gconfd (rbh00-10121): Received signal 15, shutting down cleanly

--- followed 30s later by

gconfd (rbh00-12474): GConf server is not in use, shutting down.

I note that xscreensaver was updated Apr 23 to version "1:5.02-1.fc6"; it feels right to say that this symptom started at about that time. I've seen others here mention that this might be due to xscreensaver problems. I'd had "Advanced" screensaver settings set to uncheck "Power Management Enabled" but a few days ago checked it, and set "Off After" to 0 minutes. This seemed to ameliorate the problem, which before that seemed to be happening every morning; but it still happens maybe 50% of mornings. Standby After is set to 120min, Suspend After is set to 0 min.

I may decide to backlevel my xscreensaver, just to see what happens.