[H-GEN] Mysterious lockups and other weird behaviour

[Greg Black]

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Steven Lawrance wrote:

| I've recently combined all of my home network 'services' to run on a
| single machine -- an AlphaServer 1000A running FreeBSD.  [...]
| 
| 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?

There is no good reason to use pppd -- it's old and suffering
from bitrot, while ppp is actively maintained.

| (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.)

Don't run -stable if you want stability.  The only reason ever
to run other than a -release is if you have a specific problem
that you have been told was fixed after the release or if you
are interested in working on FreeBSD (as distinct from using
it).  Try to get 4.7-release freshly installed and see what you
get.

It's impossible to diagnose beyond this from the information
provided.

If you want guesses, it's quite on the cards that you have some
flaky hardware, possibly just some bad connections caused when
you removed the internal modem.  It would certainly be worth
checking all connections and cables and running whatever you can
in the way of hardware diagnostics.

Greg

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