Hello folks ..

I could do with some pointers to help me troubleshoot a problem with my Ubuntu (intrepid) home server which seems to be hanging a couple of times a day. I'm sure it's not the server hardware for reasons I'll explain below.

Setup:
Server - Via Artigo Pico ITX ... diskless / currently swapped out with an Asus eee pc 701. ... Either system PXE boots across fastethernet .. through a switch (in fact I've used a couple of switches to discount that element) to NAS storage.

My NAS device is an unslung Linksys NSLU2 unit - exporting out the root volume via NFS. It's been up and running since 2006.

The issue:
The server becomes unresponsive to ping / no errors on the console / cursor flashing / allows command data to be typed but fails to respond once submitted (i.e at login prompt .. can type 'root' and submit but than nothing). No errors logged in messages / syslog .... it's just dead.

It seems to me that the server (what ever hardware used) - loses sight of the disk. That's my guess at least - it would explain why no errors are present in the logs.

Help me Obi Wan:
So I'm looking for a way of trapping the cause of the problem - any ideas are welcome. The system has run in a number of incarnations without issue for the last couple of years so I'm at a bit of a loss as to why this problem is happening. This server has been my pride and joy (sad I know) - providing everything from media services to SSL VPN to LDAP authentication. I'm loving Linux - learning good troubleshooting techniques would be worthwhile.

Peace.

Hi.

Take a look in /etc/syslog.conf or /etc/rsyslog.conf, and change/add/uncomment the line:
kern.* /dev/console
Then restart syslog. All kernel errors (includng any NFS stuff hopefully) should end up on the console, not in /var/log/messages.

If you want to go for the nuclear option, copy out syslog.conf, and just have the line:
*.* /dev/console
That should put every error from everything that uses syslog onto the console.

Hopefully you should have a bit more to work on after that.

Dave

Thanks Dave. That is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Many thanks for the input.

That would seem to assume
- the message you want doesn't get swamped by other messages, and scrolled off, or
- you're camped on the console.

I would still prefer the messages on disk so they can be perused at leisure. With the eeepc can you re-mount /var(/log) locally, and then boot off USB or somesuch after a hang so you can read any messages ?.

Well it's failed twice since my last post and not dumped anything to the console .. I'm going to up the level of output. If that doesn't trap it .. I'll remount /var/log to a local disk as suggested Syg. Thanks for input.

dannyboy1121x,

let me make sure I understand. Is your problem with a Via Artigo Pico ITX or an Asus eee pc 701?

Either ... they both PXE boot off the same disk. Not an issue now though as I've migrated over to CentOS