[PLUG] Help diagnosing system restarts

alan alan at clueserver.org
Thu Oct 11 16:01:20 UTC 2007


On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, 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.

Check the hourly cron jobs.  Could be something silly like "makewhatis" or 
it could be something else worth worrying about.

Should be in /etc/cron.hourly.

-- 
Never trust a queue structure designed by a cryptographer.



More information about the PLUG mailing list