On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:49:13PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm having a problem with hard crashes on my box (sid, not quite up to
> date). They seem to happen in a variety of circumstances -- the
> computer locks hard in an X session (running xfce4 usually) and is
> inaccessible by ssh or any other. If amarok is running at the time it
> will sound as though a 1-second or shorter loop is playing; otherwise
> the only indication is the disappearance of the cursor and a
> nonfunctional keyboard/mouse. OTher programs that have been running &
> using a fair bit of cpu at thetime of crash include firefox &
> dvd::rip, as well as openoffice and audacity.
>
> I've looked in /var/log/messages/ syslog/ and dmesg and don't see
> anything special. I suppose probably whatever is causing the crash is
> also failing to give me the appropriate message. What kinds of things
> can I do to help identifiy the cause of the crash further?
I'm always an advocate of looking for hardware problems for the
inconsistent type issues... set up some sensors monitoring maybe and
see if you've got anything like a failing power supply for example. I
had one that was slowly dying and the only sign was random freezes
with no common factors that I could see. But I noticed my voltages
were drifting farther and farther out of spec. new power supply solved
that problem. ymmv. .02 etc