[plug] Linux conf hang....

[Bernard Blackham]

> Orright, I'll give that a go tomorrow, thanks !
> 
> I dunno if it did a full sweep of fsck on boot - only reason I know it went
> down is because I got a call from one of the techs saying "Help ! One of the
> other tech's moved your machine without shutting it off correctly and now it
> hang's.!"
> Of all people, you think a techie would have more brains than to unplug a
> machine, especially their dial-in server, without shutting it down
> correctly?

Eeesh, you would think they'd think, yes. I've seen techs do worse, but
mainly out of clumsyness or lack of sleep....

> What is the next thing to do if I can see any specific program is freezing
> on the first console?

Hmmm, good question :)
Kill it, see if it's got a verbose debugging option (-v commonly),
generally explore and pray that it is that program and not something
upstream that's causing it to shudder. Otherwise keeping digging, I can't
really offer any more general insight sorry!

> There's a 4 Port PCI card in the server that is configured to use specific
> I/O and IRQ settings using setserial. Is it possible the power down may have
> 'cause some software IRQ conflict problems? if this is the case, it'd be a
> simple thing of telnetting into the server from another machine (since
> Telnet does work), editing /etc/rc.d/rc.local and or /etc/inittab and
> temporarily commenting out the setserial commands, see if that cures it?

Uh, it's a possibility, having very little experience with multi IO cards,
I can't really comment. You said before that they can't auth - do you know
if the machines themselves are talking and not just the modems? You might
be right about the serial ports not working - can you remotely test each
modem to see if they respond to a simple AT?

Spurious thoughts, perhaps something might help :)

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au