I'm having a rather obscure problem with an FC5 install. The system stopped responding all together, I was still able to ping it, however. After a restart all was back to normal. Normally I would leave it at that, but the customer demands an answer as to why the system halted. It runs Asterisk PBX software, powering a call center, so you can imagine why.

Since this machine is on a remote site, I have to rely on SSH to maintain the system. I spoke to someone on the phone who did have physical access to the machine. He told me the screen was black and remained black even after hitting the keyboard a few times, so I have to assume the machine was pretty much dead.

After having someone restart the system I started examining the log files, the problem is that there are no entries in any log file after 11/18/2006 18:07 and before that time there is no indication of a serious error.

Does anyone have any experience with this behavior or these symptoms, especially on this hardware or distro? Even the tinyest pointer in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

It is an FC5 system with kernel 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp running on a Dell Poweredge 1850 with 2 Xeon Hyperthreading processors and 2048 Mb of RAM. The machine has a PERC 5 RAID controller.


Many thanks in advance

The time it quit logging is either the time it went down or possibly the time your root filesystem went to 100%. If it was the latter that could cause a problem.

You've run lspci and fdisk, dmesg etc... to insure all the hardware you expect is still there? It is not unusual for a failed component to cause a system to go down.