[PLUG] Help diagnosing system restarts

[Michael Ewan]

Aaron Ten Clay wrote:
> All,
>
> I've got a box setup for my mother who is 300 miles away from me. I've 
> got logsentry emailing me unusual system activity once an hour and I can 
> ssh into the box from where I am.
>
> Here's the problem:
>
> I started noticing a couple days ago kernel boot messages in some of the 
> hourly reports. I thought it was a bit odd but not too serious. This 
> morning I see that every hour for the past 24 hours her system has 
> rebooted itself. There are no obvious messages pertaining to the reboot 
> in the log; presumably something catastrophic happens and the disk isn't 
> sync'd before the reboot.
>
> The only pattern I've noticed thus far, by looking at the timing of the 
> kernel boot messages, is that it's slowly getting later in the hour. For 
> example:
>
> 00:32:28
> 01:32:48
> 02:33:05
> 03:33:26
> 04:33:44
> 05:34:03
> 06:34:24
> 07:34:41
> 08:35:05
> 09:35:20
> 10:35:41
>
> and so on. Any ideas what might be causing this? I spoke to her and she has noticed some unusual fan activity, but I'm not sure how that could explain the reboots.
>
> TIA,
> Aaron
>   
Two things come to mind, is power management enabled in the bios or is 
there something wrong with the hardware causing a watchdog reset?  The 
former I have seen cause a periodic system lockup, but bios power 
management events combined with ACPI configuration of the system could 
cause an unexplained periodic reboot.