Geek Pop Quiz.
Feb. 7th, 2007 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingJust when I think I'm getting pretty handy with Debian, they give me a malfunctioning Fedora machine and ask me to fix it.
Here's the thing: about once a week, maybe once every two weeks, the machine locks up. Hard. Responses slow (but "top" shows very low usage of memory and CPU, just like it always does), and then roughly 20 minutes later it just stops. You can reach a login prompt, but your session will hang forever as soon as you give it a password. If you were already logged in, your program will continue to run and throw output to the screen, and you can suspend it with CTRL-Z and resume it, or kill it with CTRL-C and get a command prompt, but any command you give at that prompt, even cd or pwd, results in the session hanging.
I don't know where to *start*, here. This has been happening for a while, since before I worked there, and nobody is sure when it started or what was changed. The log files don't appear to show anything unusual, but I'm not totally sure where I should be looking for all of them.
So, pop quiz: Fedora machine locks up suddenly and without warning, repeatedly, with no particular pattern to dates, times, or usage at the time. Where do *you* start troubleshooting?
Here's the thing: about once a week, maybe once every two weeks, the machine locks up. Hard. Responses slow (but "top" shows very low usage of memory and CPU, just like it always does), and then roughly 20 minutes later it just stops. You can reach a login prompt, but your session will hang forever as soon as you give it a password. If you were already logged in, your program will continue to run and throw output to the screen, and you can suspend it with CTRL-Z and resume it, or kill it with CTRL-C and get a command prompt, but any command you give at that prompt, even cd or pwd, results in the session hanging.
I don't know where to *start*, here. This has been happening for a while, since before I worked there, and nobody is sure when it started or what was changed. The log files don't appear to show anything unusual, but I'm not totally sure where I should be looking for all of them.
So, pop quiz: Fedora machine locks up suddenly and without warning, repeatedly, with no particular pattern to dates, times, or usage at the time. Where do *you* start troubleshooting?