RHEL 4 WS freezing up on IBM ThinkCentre
 

Hi-

I have recently installed Red Hat Enterprise edition WS 4 on my IBM ThinkCentre. The install went great and everything worked fine until I left it running overnight the first night. When I came back to it in the morning, it was barely responsive. I tried to reboot but it was taking so long to take any of my actions that I had to hard boot the machine.

This seems to happen randomly, yesterday I had to hard boot the machine 4 times:(

I basically installed the default packages, with a few exceptions(mostly development packages)

Has anyone heard of this before? Know why it's happening or how I can diagnose it?

Thanks!

Interesting. I'd first look at the HW specs and config (amount of RAM, swap), what you configured (VM sysctl for instance) and then the logs for clues (make sure your loglevels aren't set too high). If nothing out of the ordinary appears then I'd install some form of SAR to generate system stats over a 24 hr period: Dstat (python), Atop or Atsar. I usually default to running Dstat in CSV mode as an at job and then check graphs in OOo for spikes or ramp-ups.

You might try booting with the "noapic" kernel option. IIRC, there's a timer problem with the Intel chipset on those machines.

I wanted to make sure I was ok before posting the solution... the noapic option seems to have fixed the freeze. I've been up for over 20 days now a couple times.

Thanks!