[plug] linux locking up

[Bernard Blackham]

On Sun, 20 May 2001, russ wrote:
> locks up completely. The mouse is still visible and moving but nothing
> responds at all.
> 
> I ctl-alt-F1 to log in as root and try to kill it but all I can do is
> type in root then enter and the password request never happens. I've
> tried all the consoles from 1 to 6 both as root and as myself but
> nothing. I have to turn off the power and restart.

Russ,

Sounds similar to some problems I had - some runaway process (ypbind and
netscape most commonly) kept spawning child processes continually until
the load average was >80 and the system was essentially unresponsive. At
the consoles I could go as far as type in root and it'd take about half an
hour for a password prompt to come up.

Now I just keep an xload and a top window open showing me any hogging
processes and kill them asap. You could keep "top" running in one console
whenever the computer's on and when it does seem to freeze switch to that
console and see if there's anything sucking the computer down, then see if
the bug with that program has been seen before, update it if need be.
Perhaps Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will also get you out of trouble (brings down
all of X and kill's all it's client windows too).

I might be way off track here. The symptoms just sound familiar to what
happened to me.

Regards,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au