See also bug 15587 for other unusual behaviors on this system. I have by default assigned this to kernel but I have no idea what's happening yet. I am using 10BaseT on an SMC 1211TX 10/100 EZ network card RealTek rtl8139.c driver at 0xf800, irq 9. I amusing telnet from another machine to access this one. It crashes and reboots every 5-10 minutes, and ftp'ing a big file. It appears to be stable overnight when I am not using the network (or perhaps when I am not doing lots of file i/o -- not sure). /var/log/messages has nothing illuminating in it (no panics, etc.) "last" shows a crash but no other info. I grep'd for "panic" and "crash" in /var/log/* but no news. See the URL for the last 200 lines of /var/log/messages. Last reboot was apparently between 17:02 and 17:13. I previously had a Lucent USB card and an Adaptec SCSI card u2940 but have removed them both.
Actually, I now see that it's been rebooting a lot and I didn't notice. I was not running anything on it.
Created attachment 2154 [details] output of last
Tonight I will try removing the ethernet card. It reboots every 7-8 minutes as it is, even with no FTP running. Any suggestions about levels of trace/debug to set would be appreciated.
Is this an i820 or i840 based motherboard with SDRAM rather than RAMBUS memory>
This is a VS440*X (FX, I think) with a 200 MHZ Pentium Pro or Pentium MMX and 128MB memory, either EDO or FPM, not sure at the moment. I removed the ethernet card and it still reboots. I noticed that it was pretty consistnt at 12 minutes, and when I was actively typing it didn't "seem" to happen, so I suspected APMD. I stopped apmd and set it to manual start with linuxconf but the problem was still there, every 12 minutes. I have now removed ethernet card, removed all other cards except video, removed floppy drive (don't ask), removed all services via linuxconf that it seemed safe to remove (i.e. i left log daemons and keytable and so on but removed all cron/anacron/at/network etc. services). I will report back tonight (it's at home and I can't test it from here because I've removed the network). I would suspect flakey hardware if it were random, but it's pretty consistent at 12 minutes.
Ok, I found the problem -- it was APM. Disabling the APM daemon had no effect, though. The BIOS had a power management option with an inactivity timeout of 10 minutes, and with IDE power down enabled. When I disabled power management competely in the BIOS and the problem went away. I did not run RH 6.2 on the system so I do not know if it is an issue there. I am marking this as WORKSFORME because there is a hardware workaround, but I note that NT ran ok with these bios settings.