[vox-tech] RH keeps crashing

[ME]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> I know it's not much to go on, but when it comes to this area, that's about 
> the limit of my expertise.  In all honesty, I'm not even entirely sure 
> which system logs to check, or how to check them.

Isolating the problems and establishing what is the likly cadidate for
blame should help to point you to a log file.
Generally speaking, few services should bring a system to a halt:
the kernel (kind of like a service for hardware to the user's
 applications) (check /var/log/kern* and dmesg |less )
modules loaded into the kernel (should really be considered part of
 kernel up above) (check /var/log/kern*  and dmesg |less )
X - a seriously big piece of software. If you enable certain direct access
 options or GLX/GL options etc, there is risk for X to crash a system.
 Where the log file is for this may differ from one distro to another.
 A common spot is /var/log/XFree86* but may not be "there". You cans
  also try looking for /var/log/xdm* /var/log/gdm* or /var/log/kd* if
  you think it might be X related.

Beyoind the above, any daemonized or inetd service can also kill a system
by exhausting memory (actually nearly any program can do this). When this
kind of "bug" hits a system, it often does not freez - it just becomes
slower and more difficult to deal with over time (sometimes seconds or
minutes or hours - it depends upon how aggressive the "bug" is and how
much in the way of resources you have.  Two intentional "bugs" like these
that are very aggressive is an intentional fork-bomb or memory-grabber,
but these are intentional attacks run on a system and in most cases lead
up to the final freez by noting the system's performance getting worse,
and a review of "uptime" or top show the system load is much higher than
usual.

> I'm just hoping it isn't hardware... I'm not all that keen on replacing my 
> hard drive. ;-)
[chop]

This kind of problem is usually not hard drive. With hardware problems,
you might see things more like IRQ/IO conflicts, overheating,
overclocking, not fully supported hardware and experimental drivers in
Linux, etc.

-ME

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