*BSD News Article 66359


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From: Christoff Snijders <hjcs@portal.ca>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Spontaneous reboot
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 07:44:49 -0700
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Yesterday morning, when I checked my FreeBSD box, I found that it had 
rebooted itself.  At first I thought that it might be the result of a 
power failure (no UPS yet--it's still running standalone) but I finally 
figured out that it wasn't a power failure at all.

Two problems:  

1.  If I run something like

find / -name text.txt -print

and I have an MS-DOS partition mounted (specifically, mount_msdos 
/dev/wds1 /mnt, where wds1 is the DOS partition on my FreeBSD disk), the 
machine reboots itself.  Is this to be expected?  After all, the 
documentation does state that mount_msdos doesn't work reliably with DOS 
versions greater than 3.3 (my DOS partition is Windows 95).

2.  Yesterday's reboot problem wasn't a question of a mounted DOS 
partition.  To try and figure it out, I checked the log, and found that 
the machine had reset itself at about 02:00.  Crontab shows an entry for 
/etc/daily at 02:00, ergo, check /etc/daily.  I ran /etc/daily manually, 
and the machine reset itself.  So I set about finding out which command 
was the culprit.  I copied the contents of /etc/daily, one command at a 
time to a test file, and ran the test file, but no reboot.  Then I 
re-ran /etc/daily, having commented out /etc/security, because it is the 
only shell script within /etc/daily.  The /etc/daily script ran fine.  
So I ran the /etc/security script manually, and it ran fine.  Then I put 
it all together again, and ran /etc/daily, including /etc/security, and 
all ran fine.  So last night, I left cron to do its work, and /etc/daily 
ran without incident.

Any ideas about what's going on?  There are no core dumps or anything 
else--the machine just reboots.  As the machine is quite new I have not 
yet modified any of the cron jobs, so they're exactly as they were 
unpacked during installation.

Thank you in advance.