Hello forum
I have a web / database server that is randomly shutting down. It is a Dell Precision 690 with 2 Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz, 8 GHz DDR2 RAM and 500 GB Western Digital black hard drive. Ship date is Oct 2006, its a six year old box. It is running CentOS 6.3 Kernal version 2.6.32-279.14.1.el6.x86_64 No GUI, running apache and MySQL, very light load
The server (repurposed workstation) is plugged into a huge UPS and bios is set to restart on power up. First time I noticed the problem was about two weeks ago. Took three times starting it to run. First two times made it 90% through O/S start then just shut down.
I check the file messages located in /var/log and can find absolutely nothing about any shutdown.

Verify your cron job, Also setup sysstat to find resource consumption. dmesg output can also be very usefull.


Thanks

Hi,

I had a similar issue a few years ago and it was the power supply that started to fail, and because the workstation does not have a HW monitoring software (iLOM, iLO, etc...) we didn't know until someone suggested we could change the power supply just to be sure that it wasn't failing and it was.
We have some very old servers (with 2 power supply) and buy the spare parts over internet. But with that we are sure that if a power supply fails, there is another.

Another problem we discovered on workstations working as servers was temperature issues, try monitoring the Temperature of your PC maybe the Bios is shutting down the server because of it.

Good luck

Sire Maxus

I actually monitor the temps and this box is VERY lightly loaded. The power supply sounds more likely, I didn't want to mention to influence anyone's diagnostics but an identical machine already had a power supply fail. I was shopping for one just now as its my first guess as well.

Great, let us know if that solves your problem

Good Luck

Sire Maxus

I replaced the power supply on this server and less then 24 hours later the machine shut itself down again. I've checked the messages log file and there is nothing I can see about the shutdown.

Hi,

How about Temperature issues?
Have you checked your Bios settings?
Have you check the fans of the workstation?

Good Luck

Sire Maxus

No it's not temp related. I monitor the temps with the Dell software. If it was getting shutdown because of temperature wouldn't there be something in the log file saying it was being shut down? The log file had nothing but the start up stuff from yesterday when I got done installing the power supply and start up stuff from today when I restarted it after it shut down

Please elaborate. Where did the "90%" come from?
There are 2 log entries somewheres!

there will be a log for the failed boot
/var/log/boot.log

if not the power supply
then a random guess would be ram
or a bad disk sector on the boot partition

but without seeing any logs ?

Capacitors on motherboard could become bad too, btw.

90% was just a guess based on the progress bar that runs across the bottom of the screen as CentOS loads. In other words it seemed the operating system was almost done starting up when it shut down. The only boot.log appears to be from the most recent successful boot, no messages indicating a problem. I looked through 2 dmesg files and all the messages files and can find nothing relating to shut downs. All seem like start up messages.
I have plenty of hard drives and could replace that. Should I run a memory diagnostic? I have a second computer identical to this one, I've considered swapping the RAM (since the RAM out of both machines is in this computer) and hard drive and seeing if that cures the issue. I looked pretty closely at the mother board and saw no signs of bad capacitors. (doesn't mean none are bad, just none looked bad)
This computer is currently lightly loaded as I have been preparing it to use for web server and database services. I can't feel confident about putting it into production running this way.

Hello,

If it was a memory or hard drive problem you'd have a crashed linux, not a shutdown machine.
Everything points to a hardware problem.

Remember, it's a PC not a server. PC's are not designed to be on 24/7, maybe it's time think on installing a new "server" on new "hardware".

Good Luck

Sire Maxus