Hi everyone,

I am seeing a strange behavior on my linux box. This is a box running RedHat 7.1, on which I have upgraded to 2.4.20 quite some time ago. I have never had any problem with this machine, for over a year it has been running fine just as I would have expected. Until recently that is. I switched my monitor from a standard one to a flat panel, which is shared as well as the keyboard and mouse through a KVM switch.

For about a couple of days everything was working as it was before, and then it started rebooting itself after just a few minutes of use. I don't have any other OS on this machine except Linux, and I don't know what could be doing this. I suspect it has something to do with the new monitor, even though this seems strange, it started happening only when I changed it. Since the other old monitor doesn't work anymore, I can't go back to test with it, so I would like to know if there are other ways to debug this. Can someone tell me what kind of log files I could take a look at? Is there some place in particular that I could take a look to see what the problem could be?

When I take a look at dmesg output, nothing special seems to come forward, but maybe I am missing something...

It sure is a coincidence, but Linux isn't like Windows, once something works, it rarely starts getting quirky. Is it starting to overheat? Are you sure you didn't change something in the display like power saving?

RO

I always suspect bad ram first.

Run memtest86 and check your ram first.

I ran memtest86 with no errors, did a little more digging around, this happens also when I am running in single mode, as well as under initlevel 3, with no X running.

Is there a log file that I could take a look at? dmesg doesn't seem to have anything in it useful. I don't know if I could recompile my kernel without having it reboot, maybe I'll give it a try...

This is all very troubling!

Heat? Are all of your fan blades clean and they are running well? Is your filter clean if you use one?

Well, that was the first thing I had thought of, and even though my fans aren't super clean, they are running just fine, and it doesn't seem like the CPU is getting too hot, I can touch the heat dispenser fine without getting burnt ;-). I have also tried running the machine without the side panels on the case to have more air coming in and that doesn't seem to make a difference...

Of course, you have unplugged and re-seated all cards and cables, haven't you?