Re: Strange system hang
On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 04:04:14PM -0500, Tyler Braun wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure if this is a hardware, kernel, or operating system issue,
> but I'm hoping somebody out there has some insight.
>
> Twice over the past few months my hard drive has seemingly gone berserk. I have
> a very loud drive, one that frequently wakes me up when running daily jobs every
> morning at 6:30ish. (sidenote: if anyone knows how to change this time please
> let me know, I've been trying for some time) Thus I'm quite sure this isn't the
> result of any rogue cron jobs.
>
> These two incidents occured at different times of day, once about 10 minutes
> after the daily cron jobs, roughly 6:40ish, the other around 10am.
>
> Both times I've tried to get my monitor to power back on but the system doesn't
> respond for a number of minutes. (5-10) After this time the monitor does power
> back on but nothings responding, and the disk continues to grind away. Each time
> this has happened I became concerned my hardware was going to be damaged and
> shut down the machine after 15-20 minutes.
>
> Thus far nothing's been damaged, and this happens very rarely. It's quite scary
> none-the-less. The first incident was around 10am, and under a 2.2.x kernel. The
> second was under a 2.4.x kernel, and occured at roughly 6:45, around 10 minutes
> after my daily cron jobs. (which often cause alot of disk activity)
>
> I'd be very interested to hear from anybody who might have encountered something
> similar. It could be standard operating system activity, but I picked up that
> the sound the drive was making wasn't normal both times, and normally during
> heavy disk activity jobs the system will respond, so I'm quite sure this is
> something out of the ordinary.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
>
I don't really understand what you are saying about the monitor. Was it
on, then went blank, or off and then you tried to turn it on? Are these
older slow machines?
It sounds to me like what your experiencing are normal daily cron jobs
but I'm not there. When cron daily runs one of the things it does is an
updatedb. This takes a lot of system resources and is noisy on older
HD's.
To change the time cron daily runs see the man page -
$ man 5 crontab
It contains some very nice examples. Basically edit -
/etc/crontab
Change the first two numbers in line -
25 6 * * * root test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || \
run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily
to reflect the time you want. The default is set to run at 25 minutes
after 6 am.
hth,
kent
--
From seeing and seeing the seeing has become so exhausted
First line of "The Panther" - R. M. Rilke
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