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Date:      Sun, 18 Nov 2001 10:21:06 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Kent Stewart <kstewart@owt.com>, Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com>, Axel Scheepers <axel@axel.truedestiny.net>, Sudirman Hassan <s9810048@mmu.edu.my>, "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net>
Cc:        Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Mysterious boot during the night
Message-ID:  <20011118102106.C72712@monorchid.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <002401c16fb7$abc1fd00$6600000a@ach.domain> <030401c16fb3$4c4d7ba0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <000c01c16f82$e2fdccc0$6600000a@ach.domain> <02fd01c16fb1$b55a67e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <1292.10.100.98.21.1006004198.squirrel@10.100.3.5> <3BF656A1.3000102@owt.com> <20011117130052.B7072@mars.thuis> <02a701c16f5e$a9cb0c70$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3BF63DB1.1070008@owt.com>
References:  <20011117130052.B7072@mars.thuis> <020e01c16f42$14885c10$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <20011117015632.B87944@xor.obsecurity.org> <02a001c16f53$215323b0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3BF63DB1.1070008@owt.com> <02a701c16f5e$a9cb0c70$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <020e01c16f42$14885c10$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <20011117015632.B87944@xor.obsecurity.org> <02a001c16f53$215323b0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3BF63DB1.1070008@owt.com>

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Various breakage in a surprising number of these messages.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at  2:36:33 -0800, Kent Stewart wrote:
>
> Which version of FreeBSD are you using? Based on your setiathome time,
> it has to be a fairly slow machine.

How do you determine that?  The time just shows how long it has been
running for.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at 12:54:44 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> Kent asks:
>
>> Which version of FreeBSD are you using?
>
> 4.3.  The kernel is identical to GENERIC except that I disabled Ctrl-Alt-Del for
> boot.

See below.  This is possibly part of the problem.

>> Based on your setiathome time, it has to be a fairly slow machine.
>
> The processor is supposedly an AMD Athlon XP at 1.5 MHz, although I
> have no easy way to confirm this.

Well, yes, you did later on with your dmesg output.

>> I am curious about the rest of the system.
>
> The motherboard is a Chaintech 7AIA5 (or perhaps 7AIA5E, I'm not sure which).
> The CPU fan is running at 4551 RPM most of the time, and the CPU temperature is
> 47-48 degrees Celsius, as reported by the BIOS.  The system temperature is 39
> degrees Celsius.

Looks OK.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at 13:00:52 +0100, Axel Scheepers wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:54:44PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>> Kent asks:
>>
>>> Which version of FreeBSD are you using?
>>
>> 4.3.  The kernel is identical to GENERIC except that I disabled Ctrl-Alt-Del for
>> boot.
>
> You might consider upgrading to 4.4-STABLE or apply the appropiate security
> patches for 4.3 since there are some vulnerabilities in it. Just use cvsup to
> fetch the sources and do a make world in your /usr/src.

That might be a worthwhile thing to do, but what makes you think this
could be a security issue?

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at  4:22:57 -0800, Kent Stewart wrote:
>
>
> Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>
>> Kent asks:
>>
>>
>>> Which version of FreeBSD are you using?
>>>
>>
>> 4.3.  The kernel is identical to GENERIC except that I disabled
>> Ctrl-Alt-Del for
>> boot.
>
>
> There are some exploits in 4.3. If you aren't running them, someone
> could have played tag with one of your daemons. That could prompt a
> mysterious reboot.

This doesn't really fit the "spontaneous reboot during cron job"
syndrome.  It reminds me more of Microsoft users blaming any crash on
viruses.

>> The motherboard is a Chaintech 7AIA5 (or perhaps 7AIA5E, I'm not
>> sure which).  The CPU fan is running at 4551 RPM most of the time,
>> and the CPU temperature is 47-48 degrees Celsius, as reported by
>> the BIOS.  The system temperature is 39 degrees Celsius.
>
> I have a 900 t'bird and it doesn't run quite that hot. I have it in
> the basement where the temperature stays under 70 degrees unless I
> turn the heat on.

Considering he's running a different processor and is keeping it 100%
busy, this seems fine.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at 22:49:12 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>
> I'm debating whether it is really a good idea to run setiathome.  I
> don't care as long as it's not putting a strain on anything, but if
> it's going to make things so warm that they become unreliable, I'll
> pass.

The processor managed 54 hours or so of seti@home.  It crashed during
a cron job.  I don't think I'd blame seti@home.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at 11:14:08 -0500, Andrew C. Hornback wrote:
> On Saturday, November 17, 2001 6:55 AM unspecified time zone, Anthony Atkielski wrote
>> The processor is supposedly an AMD Athlon XP at 1.5 MHz, although I
>> have no easy way to confirm this.  The machine is brand-new.
>
> 	Cutting edge technology... gotta love it.  *shakes his head*

Useless platitudes.  Got to hate them.

> 	What chipset does that motherboard use?  Or is it even
> possible to find out?  IIRC, Chaintech was part of the PC Chips
> line.  If that's true, that would be a poor excuse for a motherboard
> based on my experience with PC Chips products.

Specifics?

> 	Check your RAM, make sure it's properly rated for the speeds
> you're running at.  If the machine is dying in the middle of a cron
> job which does the standard system checks, you may also want to do
> some stress testing on the disk subsection.  Also check dmesg for
> any anomalous readings (cards that don't show up, hardware that's
> detected but "unknown", etc.)

The disks are the obvious thing to look at, since seti@home keeps RAM
busy as well.

On Saturday, 17 November 2001 at 23:00:34 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> Andrew writes:
>
>> What chipset does that motherboard use?
>
> VIA KT133A/KTE133 + VT82C686B AGPset

Now we're getting closer.  There were problems with IDE data
corruption and the VT82C686B.  sos committed a fix to -CURRENT about 2
months ago:

sos         2001/09/25 10:10:39 PDT

  Modified files:
    sys/dev/ata          ata-pci.c 
  Log:
  Add a fix for the VIA82C686B data corruption bug.
  This fixed the problem on the 3 platforms I've been able to test on.
  
  I'm still of the oppinion that the BIOS should take care of this,
  however some board makers only apply this when they spot a
  SBLive! soundcard, but the problem exists even without a SBLive!.
  
  This fix should probably go somewhere else, but for now I'll
  keep it here since we havn't got a central place to put
  such things.
  
  Revision  Changes    Path
  1.11      +51 -19    src/sys/dev/ata/ata-pci.c

He doesn't appear to have MFCd to -STABLE.  You should probably get in
touch with him.  I'm not copying him here, because I don't think he'll
read through all this message.

>> If the machine is dying in the middle of a cron job which does the
>> standard system checks, you may also want to do some stress testing
>> on the disk subsection.
>
> It just has an ordinary IDE disk, nothing fancy.

It doesn't need to be fancy.

> CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1500+ (1335.63-MHz 686-class CPU)

Here's the evidence of your processor and its speed.

Greg
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