Wtf? puzzling lock-ups
Hi. As the subject suggests, I get strange freeze-ups on my machine. Yes,
it's definitely frozen... I can't ping it from my lan, and nothing
responds... no keybd, no mouse, no nothing.
This occurs once every couple of weeks. So far I have not been able to
get more than 21 days of uptime, since installing Debian 2.1 on this
machine in mid-April of this year.
The funny thing that I started to notice the last time it locked up is
that the system clock jumps when it occurs. I had been noticing funny
syslogs in the sense that I would see normal log entries occurring at,
let's say, 10:00, then it would lock up and I'd reboot and then I'd see
the end of the syslog contain new records that were from 9:45... 15 mins
EARLIER. It took me a while to put 2 and 2 together, but I can safely say
now that each time the machine freezes, the clocks either skips ahead or
behind anywhere from 15-25 minutes, and I have to re-set the time after
rebooting.
Another interesting thing is this part of my /var/log/syslog file:
Aug 11 01:12:55 my_machine pppd[14060]: sent [LCP EchoReq id=0x60
magic=0x6e5674f0]
Aug 11 01:12:55 my_machine pppd[14060]: rcvd [LCP EchoRep id=0x60
magic=0x4f4b52b8]
Aug 11 01:13:25 my_machine pppd[14060]: sent [LCP EchoReq id=0x61
magic=0x6e5674f0]
Aug 11 01:13:25 my_machine pppd[14060]: rcvd [LCP EchoRep id=0x61
magic=0x4f4b52b8]
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
The next log entry from pppd would have occurred 30 seconds after the last
one, except this is where my machine froze... and apparently whatever
process was writing to the syslog file at the time got screwed and just
dumped garbage into it.
It MAY only be occurring while X is running, although I can't really
verify that since X is always running. The reason I say that though is
because the last 3 times this happened, it was while I was dragging
windows around or picking items from drop-down lists in Netscape (4.51
Comm).
I am running XFree86 3.3.3.1-2 (from netgod.net/x), although this also
happened with the stock slink XFree86. I'm on a 2.0.37 kernel... but
again this was an issue in 2.0.36 as well. Window manager is Window Maker
0.53. Hardware is a P133, Asus P/I P55T2P4 mobo, 64 MB RAM, NE2000 NIC,
Hercules Dynamite 128/Video card (2 MB).
Has anyone got any ideas about where I might look for a solution to this?
Unfortunately I cannot make this happen at will, it seems to be quite
unpredictable.
Also, any (free) software I can get that would be able to perform some
thorough tests on my RAM and CPU? Perhaps it's one of those ubiquitous
"hardware issues."
Thanks for any assistance provided.
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