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Bug 15588

Summary: Unexplained system reboot after 12 minutes of inactivity
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. <klotz>
Component: kernelAssignee: Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 7.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
URL: http://www.graflex.org/pinstripe-messages.txt
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2000-08-08 18:17:29 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Attachments:
Description Flags
output of last none

Description Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-07 00:25:33 UTC 
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.
Comment 1 Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-07 05:47:45 UTC 
Actually, I now see that it's been rebooting a lot and I didn't notice.  I was not running anything on it.
Comment 2 Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-07 05:49:28 UTC 
Created attachment 2154 [details]
output of last
Comment 3 Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-07 18:21:57 UTC 
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.
Comment 4 Alan Cox 2000-08-08 00:29:14 UTC 
Is this an i820 or i840 based motherboard with SDRAM rather than RAMBUS memory>
Comment 5 Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-08 18:17:27 UTC 
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.
Comment 6 Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. 2000-08-09 06:31:36 UTC 
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.