[H-GEN] linux box just went dead

[James McPherson - Customer Technical Support Engineer]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and ]
[ Unix-related topics.  Please observe the list's charter.          ]

YH Tan wrote
> 
> i've encountered this strange "phenomenon" recently on my 2-way linux (with
> redhat distri) box. 2-way, coz it's a gateway connect 2 networks, with some
> ipchains rules running. i usually left the box running overnite. seldom
> reboot unless i made changes to the sys conf that req'd rebooting.
> 
> the strange thing was that the linux system just crashed for unknown reason
> to me. it's just posted a screen dump of this messages:
> CPU:0
> EIP:0010:[<c358fc20>]
> EFLAGS: 00010a86
> eax: 00000240   ebx: 00000240   ecx: 00000000  edx: b8660cf8
> esi: 000005a6   edi: c20d8db8   ebp: c20d8812  esp: c0217d28
> ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
> Process swapper ...blah blah blah
> stack: ...blah blah blah...
> Call trace: [<c014b2f9>] .... blah blah blah
> 
> This occurred to me a few times, i could do anything besides resetting the
> system. everytime, the string of nos. are different. except for the first
> few set of "Call trace" nos. which have some similarity pattern in the few
> occasions.
> 
> i tried ping (from another system) to see if there's response, nope, it just
> went dead. Have anyone encountered this before? Please enlighten me if u've
> encountered anything like that. If u've some ideas or tots to help me
> rectify this strange phenomenon, pls pitch feel free to pitch in.
> 

isn't there something about this in .../linux/Documentation/oops-tracing.txt ?

I think the basic way to fix it (apart from installing the SGI linux crash dump 
stuff which I think is still beta) is to 

a) install sysklogd at least 1.3-pl3 and activate its special features, or
b) cd /usr/src/linux/scripts/ksymoops
   make ksymoops
   ./ksymoops < the_oops.txt


where the_oops.txt is the oops message (complete and unadulterated) then send 
the output to whoever maintains the swapper code.

This is just from the .../linux/Documentation/oops-tracing.txt file btw.

That said, it's a pity you ain't got a sparc box ;| - I could give you a bit 
more help with that (and even more if you were running Solaris on it!)

cheers,
James C. McPherson

--
Solution Centre Engineer              828 Pacific Highway 
Sun Microsystems Australia Pty Ltd    Gordon NSW 2072
             Support Helpline: 1-800-555-786



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