[H-GEN] Mysterious lockups and other weird behaviour

[Steven Lawrance]

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Hello all,

I've recently combined all of my home network 'services' to run on a
single machine -- an AlphaServer 1000A running FreeBSD.  The major change
was moving the modem to this box (also running squid, freenet6, nfsd,
samba, etc).  Before this, the box had an uptime of about a month (which
would have been much longer had it not been for power outages).

Now it locks up -- freezes completely, dead to the world, etc -- at
seemingly random intervals without a hint of why.  There's no clues in
any logs (I syslog *.* to a remote host) but all signs seem to point to
the modem/ppp/serial stuff, so I've tried using both userland 'ppp' and
'pppd' to no avail, and bought a new (external, serial, 56k) modem (I
needed a good excuse to replace the old 33k6 internal ISA modem) but the
problem persists.

This is happening any time from ten minutes to a few days after bootup.
So, I'm stumped.  Does anyone have any advice on diagnosing such problems?

(Running freebsd-stable, last updated and world & kernel rebuilt a few
days ago... it's a bit tricky to change things back to the way they were
at the moment.)

Also, I noticed that everything that happens on the console (a serial
terminal) is getting syslogged almost as though it was a copy of stdout,
and I don't have a clue why...

-- 
Steven Lawrance
www.koffein.net

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