OGL (was Re: Random total lockups)

[Cyrus Adkisson]

This thread ended quite a while ago, but I FINALLY figured out what was 
causing my "random total lockups" and share with the world so that 
someone else may be able to avoid the months of agony I went through.

After replacing what I thought was *every single piece* of hardware in 
my box (a dual opteron server running FC2 2.6.5 and then 2.6.8) 
including the motherboard, memory, case/power supply, video card, etc. 
and plowing through a bunch of money yet still getting the same 
completely random lockups, I had pretty much given up. I noticed that 
turning off the X server seemed to prevent such lockups, so basically I 
could sleep at night knowing that as long as X was off, the server would 
still run.

Out of sheer dumb luck, my landlord kicked me out of my apartment and I 
had to find a new place to live. When I moved into my new apartment, my 
CRT monitor jiggled due to an unusually strong magnetic field, so I had 
to scrap it and get an LCD which has no vaccum tube to be affected by 
the magnetic field.

Lo and behold, I haven't had a lockup since.  That was 60 days ago. I'd 
never gone more than 11 days without a lockup before. I did have lockups 
in the new apartment before the LCD came, so I know it wasn't the power 
(using UPS's anyway) or some other factor in the move. My conclusion is 
that one of two things was happening:

a) The monitor was sending some sort of voltage feedback back into the 
motherboard, causing the machine to lock (unlikely), OR
b) The module/code controlling the Samsung 955df CRT monitor was flawed 
(much more likely, I'd say). Once I plugged in the LCD and configured X 
to handle a "generic LCD" rather than the Samsung, I stopped having lockups.

There is an outside chance that one of my xorg package updates also 
corrected whatever problem might have been there. I'm not exactly sure. 
I do know that I tried upgrading xorg several times and it never helped 
before. I'm also disinclined to believe that due to the incredible 
coincidental timing of the last lockup, which occurred just a day or two 
before the new LCD was installed.

Hope this helps somebody else in the future.

Cyrus


Alexander Dalloz wrote:

>Am Do, den 05.08.2004 schrieb Cyrus Adkisson um 17:46:
>
>  
>
>>I did try apic=no as a boot option.... is it really "noapic" instead?
>>
>>Cyrus
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, if you trust Alan Cox more:
>
>http://www.fedorafaq.org/fc1/#AlanCox
>
>Or even better the kernel documentation:
>
>$ grep -n noapic /usr/src/linux-2.6.7-1.494.2.2/Documentation/*
>/usr/src/linux-2.6.7-1.494.2.2/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt:704:
>noapic        [SMP,APIC] Tells the kernel not to make use of any
>
>Alexander
>
>
>  
>


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Cyrus Adkisson
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