[nycbug-talk] FreeBSD rebooting every 120 seconds =-(

[Jonathan Vanasco]

Same thing happened to me this summer.

Gave every suggestion it was some odd software / disk error.

It wasn't.  The culprit?  Bad power supply from a brownout/power  
fluctuation in the building, which eventually fried the CPU.

I'd toss a new power supply in there ASAP, just to be safe, as you  
continue your testing (they're like $30, you might even have a  
spare).  Then check to make sure all of the CPU and case fans are in  
working order.  If this is the problem, and you get to it in time,  
your CPU/MoBo is safe.  In my situation, it was the last thing I  
tested, and it ended up taking out the CPU.  Not ideal.

 From my experience, this  sounds exactly like that issue -- but  
thats only because I've NEVER had a non-windows machine go into a  
reboot cycle aside from this one bad power supply.


On Dec 27, 2005, at 12:19 PM, N.J. Thomas wrote:

> Sometime last week, the FreeBSD 5.4-p6 machine I had been using  
> merrily
> since August started crapping out on me.
>
> It rebooted spontaneously twice last week while I was using it.  
> Over the
> weekend, it rebooted itself at least two more times.
>
> (I have installed no new software on this box in months, and I'm  
> fairly
> certain it is not a security issue (it's tied down fairly well, and  
> the
> only service pf allows is ssh from the local LAN).)
>
> This morning I came back in to find that it is rebooting roughly every
> 2-3 minutes or so, but only when I access the disk.
>
> Nothing in /var/log seems to indicate what is the problem, but I  
> noticed
> I was able to get it to reboot on me twice by running "less
> /var/log/messages". I noticed I can occasionally make it reboot if I
> open some file.
>
> Has anyone experience anything similar? How can I go about debugging
> this?
>
> If this a disk issue, I can easily replace the disk and restore
> everything from the latest backup, but I'd like to find the root cause
> before I start throwing hardware at the problem.
>
> Any suggestions appreciated.
>
> Thomas