[Eug-lug] Random freezes

[Martin Kelly]

Nothing in any of the Xorg logs, or any of the other logs in /var/log in 
general...

I will check on Numlock next time it happens. Luckily, I haven't had a 
crash in a day *fingers crossed*. I ran fdisk and badblocks on it, and 
it didn't seem to find any errors. I don't know if this has had an 
affect on it... hopefully.

After it crashes, I have confirmed that ssh does not work. When I get 
back to the computer, physically, it is on but the monitor has 
disconnected. So it's in a weird state where the power is on but the 
system is not.

Martin

Neil Parker wrote:
> Martin Kelly wrote,
>> Nothing in /var/log/messages or dmesg... I don't think it's the kernel, 
>> thankfully.
> 
> It might also be worthwhile to look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and possibly
> /var/log/syslog.
> 
>> Yeah, I wasn't able to do Ctrl+Alt+F6 to get to a virtual tty. Is X able 
>> to free that up?
>>
>> I just switched to amarok and I'm not getting crashes anymore. I'm 
>> thinking it might've been XMMS's fault. I'd heard it was buggy, but 
>> crashing a whole system? Also, I've been using XMMS for almost a year 
>> and never had the problem... weird.
> 
> Just because you can't switch virtual TTYs doesn't mean the whole system
> is locked up...it might be just your X server that's locked up.  X
> disables normal keystroke processing and does all the raw scancode
> processing (including handling the VT-switching keys) itself, so if X
> locks up, you're stuck with no way to switch to another virtual terminal.
> 
> I've had X lock up on me a few times.  In my case it was usually due to
> video hardware flakiness (helpful hint:  never put an NVidia card into
> a motherboard with an ALi 1541 chipset), but sometimes applications can
> trigger bugs that cause X to freeze or crash.
> 
> When this happens, it may be possible to recover if you've left yourself
> some other way to log in.  If your computer is on a network, you can run
> sshd or telnetd, and then when trouble strikes you can ssh or telnet in
> from some other computer on the network.  On my system I have a cable
> running from my serial port to another computer, where I can use kermit to
> log in.
> 
> Once you're in, the easiest way to clear up the problem may be to do a
> clean reboot ("sudo shutdown -r now").  If you're feeling cleverer, a
> frozen X server might be fixable by "kill -9"ing it.
> 
>                - Neil Parker
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