Less than an hour later, I needed to get a file off my computer in one of
my classes. When I tried to ftp to my computer, the machine didn't
respond, even though there wasn't a hardware problem in between (I checked
other machines on the same subnet, including my roommate's box).
When I got a chance to come home and see what the deal was, I discovered
that my box had sort-of crashed. The kernel re-compile had quit while
half-way done, and all users were logged out. Not only that, the video
had reset to 25-line mode (I always run in 50), X had been terminated,
and the network was unreachable. Also, all my drives had been remounted
in read-only mode, and /proc had been unmounted (and would no longer
mount, since / and /etc/mtab were read-only).
I had to reboot to clear all this up.
There was absolutely nothing in any system log. Kernel logs contain no
error messages of any kind, though I suspect this is because whatever
hosed the system might have killed syslogd/klogd (of course, come to think
of it, the fact that /var was now read-only for some reason wouldn't have
helped ;-). They show a message from when I was doing mail this morning
(successful identd), and then show nothing until the restart. wtpm shows
people (meaning me as root and chris that I'd left logged in--no one else
uses my computer that early ;-) logging off right when the "crash" must
have occurred, and no one else logging on until I logged on after I
rebooted.
I realize that this is probably of no use to anyone, since there aren't
any error messages. I really have no idea what happened though. My box
is usually quite stable, even with the development kernels; the only oops
I ever get is from the cdu33a loading as a module. It's a pentium with 16
megs ram, 18 megs swap, ide hard drive, ne2000 ethernet, gus max sound
card, everything possible compiled as modules.
The system couldn't have rebooted either--no one has enough access besides
me to be able to reboot without it showing up in logs. My roommate, who
wouldn't have even been up when it "crashed" could have possibly
physically reset it via the Big Red Button, but he says he didn't;
besides, there's no way he could do that without a message appearing in
log files, either from the shutdown or the reboot (he doesn't even have an
account on my system).
Any ideas?
A very perplexed chris
-- Chris Ricker gt1355b@prism.gatech.edu chris@ricker.gt.ed.net