Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 25738
Machine reboots during nighttime standby. Related to apmd ?
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:31:05 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: After an upgrade from RedHat 6.1 to RedHat 7.0 the system hangs or, more frequently, reboots suddenly without any apparent reason. During daytime I can launch several 'heavy' application at a time without too much problems but, when I leave the machine at the login screen during the night (maybe with some background processes of mine) every morning after I find it has been rebooted (or stopped). The same happens to a colleague, after a clean installation of RedHat 7.0. Could it be related to some deamons (apmd ??) which is activated after long standbies? Generically they're desktop PC's equipped with Athlon CPU, 256 Mb of RAM, ethernet network card ... Need more info? Thanks for your time. C.D.E.B. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Exit from a regular session, possibly leaving some background program running. 2. Wait for the night leaving the PC on. 3. Find it rebooted or hang?
Can't be apmd. Most likely flaky hardware, possibly a kernel bug. Assigning to the kernel group.
Can be screensaver related. Do you and your colleague happen to have the same brand of videocard ?
In fact, both the video cards should be of the ATI Mach family (8 Mb of video RAM). Screensavers seem to be the path to follow, even if sometimes the machine hangs or reboots while I'm working...What should we try? What has changed in this sense from RedHat 6.x to RedHat 7.0? Are there relevant upgrades to the installation CD's? Thanx! C.D.E.B.
Well, try turning off the screensavers first to make sure that they are the problem before pursuing it any further.
Well, but how can I turn off the screensaver from a login manager window (which in my case has become that of GNOME after the upgrade)? C.D.E.B.
GNOME control center. It's the toolbox icon.
I'm now convinced that it's not directly related to screensavers. I leave my session opened with screensaver disabled and the machine hangs anyway. One time it hanged while I was doing nothing but editing an e-mail ... Any suggestions? Thanks, C.D.E.B.
Ugh. We have similar machines here without seeing this problem at all. It could even be the X server -- could you try shutting down X overnight and see if the problem persists?
Darn ... I disabled all screensavers and quit from X during nighttime but the problem persists and gets worse. This morning I found the machine hanged. I restarted it and in one hour it stopped other two times, while making simple things like editing a text or reading a message. My colleague gave it up and passed to another distribution. Another one told me it could be something related with crond (or maybe anacron) which is periodically trying to perform a task which cannot be completed due to some other problem (lack of directory or else). A partial confirm could come from the fact that, initially, when I upgraded to RH7 at home under root there came tons of fuzzy messages from crond. Any ideas? Thanks again, C.D.E.B.
Maybe is something related with AMD Athlon (700 MHz) processors. However, better to give up...I passed to DEBIAN. Thanks anyway, C.D.E.B.
Closing bug WORKSFORME due to lack of ability to reproduce, and reporter indication of changing distributions and no longer being interested in troubleshooting/etc.