*BSD News Article 67092


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From: brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Spontaneous reboot
Date: 28 Apr 1996 12:04:04 +0100
Organization: Coverform Ltd.
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <4lvjb4$ba@anorak.coverform.lan>
References: <31765561.52EF@portal.ca>
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: awfulhak.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

Christoff Snijders (hjcs@portal.ca) wrote:
: 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.

Check /var/cron/tabs & /etc/crontab.  If your daily is running from both,
the system will crash & burn.  It took me some time to figure this out
when I upgraded from 2.0.5 to 2.1 (the upgrade adds /etc/crontab).

I believe there have been a few bug fixes regarding vnodes - the area that
my machine was croaking on - so the problem may be gone in 2.2-960323-SNAP.

--
Brian <brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour....