Hi,
I have a PC with Fedora 9 running 24/7 a Firefox window that is always showing a Flash movie with a menu. This Flash movie contacts a MySQL database in order to get its info each 20 minutes, and everytime it does this it also adds an item to an event log so I can check remotly whether it is working or not.
Furthermore the php file that loads the Flash movie also checks if there is a newer version of the movie.
However, from time to time, sometimes a week or 2, sometimes just a couple of hours, it stops the refreshing cycle.
Can you help me? A coleague just told me to reboot the machine once a week, is this a correct method to prevent it from hanging?
Thanks in advance.

Is it possible you could run something like a debian install to do the same thing? Using a cutting edge distro like fedora for such a task does not seem like the wisest move to me.

Actualy, the only stuff I use is Firefox with full-screen add-on.
As I said before the only THING realy needed is the 24/7 workload.

I think to be really able to help you, we will have to understand exactly what you are doing. The first thing that came to mind for me is, why are you using FF to show a movie? Why not use VLC? It is designed to show movies and is pretty good at it. It can stream movies from remote locations too.

There is this restaurant that sends me by mail their menus for each week (they just hate everything related to computers, and everyday their menu changes) in order to present them in fashionable way to their costumers.
So, I came up with the idea of having a remote MySQL DB where I insert the menus' data for a owl week (kind of a back-office) and a Flash movie, running at the restaurant, that contacts the DB, retrieves de info for that specific day and presents it on a Plasma screen with the presentation benefits that are available in Flash.
Everything works fine, but, as I said before, from times to time, it just stops for some reason.
I build this with some PHP, Flash and Firefox with the Fullscreen add-on.

Once again thanks for your help.

The reason to use Fedora and not another one is due to the restaurant owner's son who knows the OS and if something happens he can be of some help to me troubleshooting it remotly.
Of course if there is another way of doing it, with another distro, another SW, whatever it might be, I'm all ears.

Just an idea: I doubt that the restaurant is open 24/7 ?

In this case, I suggest creating a cron job on the machine to shut down FF when the restaurant closes, then start again when the restaurant opens?

Actually, there is, and this is one of them (just in case there are more)!
Part of the restaurant closes from 1 A.M. until 8 A.M.
Never the less, although cronjob is not the solution due to schedule reasons, I've tried it before and the very same stuff happens.

Have you tried running one of the newest versions of Opera? I find it is far more usable in certain situations than FF. Even still, I don't know that you are gonna find something that will work 100%.

Also, I've been running prism recently for web apps, it's based on FF, Single Site Browser principle. Do something like monit, which will monitor the process, and if it dies, it automagically re-spawns the program..

If the problem persists with Opera, I am going to suggest that flash is the problem. Are you using version 10? This is one of the reasons I suggested VLC.

That's an option, I will try Opera, if this doesn't work I'm thinking on formating the HD again. If this happens do you suggest any particular OS other than Fedora for this purpose?

If the problem persists with Opera that would indicate that Flash is the problem. If Flash is the problem, switching distros is not going to help. Again which version of Flash are you running?

I would suggest Centos, mostly becuase of the five year support life (compared to Fedora's 13 month support life). Centos is RHEL with the logos removed. It is free to download/update (unlike RHEL) and is very stable.

Centos would be a good option or Debian Stable

Agree, CentOS or Debian are good choices