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Date:      Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:38:48 -0800
From:      Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>
To:        n j <nino80@gmail.com>, "Anthony M. Rasat" <anton@kaltengpos.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Unexpected shutdown
Message-ID:  <20071119003848.GB26008@thought.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071118225849.GA84995@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
References:  <92bcbda50711180451h5db8f4ady6e2d21da80d32548@mail.gmail.com> <20071118163747.36C5F4AB7D@mail.kaltimpost.net> <92bcbda50711181312l1dc6b26cteaad3c8db11e17b6@mail.gmail.com> <20071118225849.GA84995@slackbox.xs4all.nl>

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On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 11:58:49PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 10:12:34PM +0100, n j wrote:
> > I know there are many possibilities out there, but I am pondering this
> > for the whole day and ruled out everything that came to mind. So, any
> > other ideas - even humorous - are welcome.
> 
> Since it was a regular shutdown as opposed to a panic, something must
> have triggered that shutdown.
> 
> UPS drivers can shut the system down, but you seemed to have ruled
> that out?
> 
> It could be triggered by the acpi_thermal driver. Check system
> temperatures with sysctl or mbmon.
> 
> Roland


	If the system both shutdown *and* rebooted, I had  the same 
	inexplicable thing happen to me many times.  It began happening
	to my Dell 8200 (hmm?) say, three months ago, and I 
	believe I solved the problem about 6 weeks ago.  

	There was some unknown fs fault in my /var slice.  Just by sheer
	chance, I watched my server abruptly powered down when something 
	[maybe] tried to write to /var/* and failed.   At first I
	thought it was bad memory; then, just-maybe, a bad drive.
	(The drive is new, and 512MB of the DDR is also new.)  I
	also thought it was a heat problem, and that I needed another
	fan.   ... .

	Long story short, I  saved /var /<somewhere>, then found
	something I couldn't remove. chflags did no good.   Finally
	I did a /bin/rm -rf /var.  After I added it back, newfs'd it,
	and copied back the stuff, no-more-spontaneous-and-random
	reboots.

	gary

	PS: it was fsck that couldn't fix the bad spot. The fault was
	    related to an inode allocation snafu.  but i've  never 
	    hacked any fs code, so ....  



> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
> [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
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-- 
  Gary Kline  kline@thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
      http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org




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