Very Computer

Hello All,

I have a little problem.

We are a small private school that has moved from a pure M$ house to almost
pure linux. We run linux on the server and it does Samba (for the few
winnderrrs boxen), NAT, NIS, NFS, firewall, and fileserving. It is Redhat
7.3. It is as stable as any box I have ever seen.

In the lab, we have 20 boxen which are mostly K6 AMD boxes with a few Dells.
We have run SuSE and also RedHat. We have used GDM and KDM.

The problem is that the boxes will freeze at the login screen every once in
a while. The box goes unused for a while and the screen blanks --- and most
of the time moving the mouse or hitting a key brings back the screen. But,
every once in a while the box must be re-booted to regain controll.

Hell fire, this is heaven compared to last year with 18 win98 boxes (same
machines). But, I would like to fix this little irritation.

Oh, it seems only the K6 AMD home built boxes with freeze.

Any ideas?

--
Regards, Joe
GNU/Linux user # 225822

Error log for Tue, 22 Oct 2002 21:13:47 +0000, segfault in module "Joe
Potter": dump details are as follows...

Quote:> Hello All,

> I have a little problem.

> We are a small private school that has moved from a pure M$ house to
> almost pure linux. We run linux on the server and it does Samba (for the
> few winnderrrs boxen), NAT, NIS, NFS, firewall, and fileserving. It is
> Redhat 7.3. It is as stable as any box I have ever seen.

> In the lab, we have 20 boxen which are mostly K6 AMD boxes with a few
> Dells. We have run SuSE and also RedHat. We have used GDM and KDM.

> The problem is that the boxes will freeze at the login screen every once
> in a while. The box goes unused for a while and the screen blanks ---
> and most of the time moving the mouse or hitting a key brings back the
> screen. But, every once in a while the box must be re-booted to regain
> controll.

> Hell fire, this is heaven compared to last year with 18 win98 boxes
> (same machines). But, I would like to fix this little irritation.

> Oh, it seems only the K6 AMD home built boxes with freeze.

> Any ideas?

I would bet that there is some sort sort of conflict between the power
saving features of the BIOS and apmd.

I would try either disabling the Power Saving from the BIOS   -XOR-
disable the apmd.  That's an exclusive or, btw.

;-)

--
rapskat -   6:22pm  up 24 days, 19:07,  2 users,  load average: 1.35, 0.97, 0.99
108 processes: 99 sleeping, 9 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% system,  0.1% nice,  0.0% idle

If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average.

OK, a little more detail please. :-)

--
Regards, Joe
GNU/Linux user # 225822

I've run a K6 400 for some time with no stability problems, but the
processor is buggy.  Aparently people were noticing that when compiling
kernels, GCC died with SIGSEGV, which should never happen, and AMD
discovered that this was a bug in the CPU.  It may not be common enough
to cause this problem, though, and I only heard it regarding GCC, which
fails because it uses a _lot_ of pointers.

Otherwise, can you telnet or ssh into the boxes when they're hung?

--
Nucleon, RLU #278930, <http://counter.li.org/>

I created the universe, give *me* the gift certificate!
 -- Lisa Simpson, Treehouse of Horror VII (4F02)

After takin' a swig o' grog, Joe Potter belched out this bit o' wisdom:

Quote:> The problem is that the boxes will freeze at the login screen every once in
> a while. The box goes unused for a while and the screen blanks --- and most
> of the time moving the mouse or hitting a key brings back the screen. But,
> every once in a while the box must be re-booted to regain controll.

> Oh, it seems only the K6 AMD home built boxes with freeze.

There was a problem with K6's on RedHat, but that was in version 6,
I thought.   I couldn't install Redhat properly on my K6 laptop.

You should look in /etc/rc5.d and try Rappie's suggestion about
turning of the screen power management, maybe in your BIOS, too.

Just guessing.

--

BIOS is what allows the computer to load an operating system, and.  Usually
when the machine powers up, there is a message for a few seconds, "press f2
for setup" or del, or something.  It varies among motherboard manufacturers.

Once you get into setup, you will likely find a "Power Management" section.
Turn everything off, set to none, whatever.  Again, the words depend on the
motherboard manufacturer.  BIOS settings are usually toggles - you select
the feature, then hit space bar or +/- to cycle among the choices.  Try that
on a box known to experience the symptom for a while.

I don't actually know how to keep a daemon from starting in your system.
Are you running SuSe or RedHat?  I'm a bsd goon, myself.  If you log in as
root and issue a "ps -ax | grep apmd" you will get a process id (PID) for
it.  If the PID =  1123 issue a "kill -9 1123"  The next time the machine
boots, apmd will run, so keep that in mind for the test.  If the problem
happens on a box where apmd has been killed, check back- the problem is
elsewhere.

Another thing you might try - just because the graphical environment is dead
doesn't mean you can't get to a console.  Try sitting down at the box and
hitting control+alt+f1 or control+alt+f2 up to f6 (?)  If the machine is
working o.k., you'll get a different terminal.  You could then kill X and
restart it without restarting the whole machine.  This doesn't improve
anything but your uptime stats...  Ask if you get that far.

And congrats on the move!

Recompile your kernel, disable APM and enable ACPI instead. Uninstall APMD.

Quote:> Hello All,

> I have a little problem.

> We are a small private school that has moved from a pure M$ house to
almost
> pure linux. We run linux on the server and it does Samba (for the few
> winnderrrs boxen), NAT, NIS, NFS, firewall, and fileserving. It is Redhat
> 7.3. It is as stable as any box I have ever seen.

> In the lab, we have 20 boxen which are mostly K6 AMD boxes with a few
Dells.
> We have run SuSE and also RedHat. We have used GDM and KDM.

> The problem is that the boxes will freeze at the login screen every once
in
> a while. The box goes unused for a while and the screen blanks --- and
most
> of the time moving the mouse or hitting a key brings back the screen. But,
> every once in a while the box must be re-booted to regain controll.

> Hell fire, this is heaven compared to last year with 18 win98 boxes (same
> machines). But, I would like to fix this little irritation.

> Oh, it seems only the K6 AMD home built boxes with freeze.

> Any ideas?

> --
> Regards, Joe
> GNU/Linux user # 225822

Error log for Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:12:03 +0000, segfault in module "Joe
Potter": dump details are as follows...

Most modern BIOS have power saving features which control the state of
various components after a period of system inactivity.  These include
putting the system in a power saving "suspend" state by spinning down
drives, turning off the monitor, and sometimes even putting the CPU in a
sort of "hibernation" mode.

The Advanced Power Management functions of Linux (as controlled by the
apmd daemon), also do this from a software stance.

There is a chance that the two may be conflicting when one is kicking in,
and also the other, putting the system in a sort of "coma" from which no
input device event will trigger a wakeup.

Disabling one or the other should resolve this for you if it is the case.

At my last job, we had a similar problem when putting Win95 on newer T21
laptops.  Since Win95 didn't recognize the hardware suspend state, it got
sort of confused and misinterpreted it as a power down condition, shutting
off the laptop in mid-session.  I believe IBM eventually issued a patch
fix for it, but the short term fix was to just disable power saving from
the BIOS.

--
rapskat -   6:48am  up 25 days,  7:33,  1 user,  load average: 0.67, 0.87, 0.75
103 processes: 99 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.1% system,  0.1% nice,  0.0% idle

To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System.

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Check the logs. Maybe there is just some process eating all your
memory, and then folds the box.

        Cheers
        Tuomo

--
___
   "Microsoft OS's are good because they encourage Intel to produce
    faster CPUs for the rest of us to run Unix on."
                                                         George Dau

Yeah -- I have the problem occasionally on my laptop as well.  When the
"apm saver", which basically blanks the LCD panel on my laptop, blanks
the screen, I can usually wake it up by hitting a key, or moving the
mouse.  But sometimes, the thing refuses to wake up at all.  I've seen
this behavior on Windows ME, FreeBSD, and Linux, so I know it's an apm
BIOS bug.  It very rarely happens to me on FreeBSD anymore, but once in
a very very great while it'll freeze up like you said.

I'd try enabling "enable interrupts during suspend", or whatever the
option is.  It didn't stop the freezes from happening to me, so I guess
the best way to prevent them is to simply disable APM altogether, and
just turn off the monitor by hand when not in use.

But it doesn't really happen to me to me anymore, except on rare occasion.

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Datagram from Tuomo Takkula incoming on netlink socket

Quote:

> Check the logs. Maybe there is just some process eating all your
> memory, and then folds the box.

Couple of hints in that case:

-Turn on unlimited overcommitting (put "1" to
/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory.) It will disable checking if machine has
enough memory to back memory allocations. It actually can save system in
case there is mad memory-eater (the memory-eater gets OOMed.).
-When runaway memory eater is running, the box will soon start to swap
like mad, producing heavy disk traffic. Almost frozen box with HDD going
like mad is strong sign of memory-eating program.

-Ilari
--
Hmm... If your computer crashes more often than once in year, it
should be fixed. -- Ilari Liusvaara
Linux LK_Perkele_IV9 2.4.18 #8 SMP Thu Mar 14 19:42:25 EET 2002 i686 unknown
  7:01pm  up 109 days, 23:31,  5 users,  load average: 0.13, 0.10, 0.10

No need to distinguish an XOR as that is the standard meaning of "OR" in the
English language.