[plug] interesting hardware? oddity

[Tomasz Grzegurzko]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Denis Brown <dsbrown at cyllene.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> Hello PLUG list members,
>
>  One for the memoires I suspect :-)
>
>  An old IBM chassis Pentium 4 with previously reliable hardware.   Nuked it
> and loaded openSuSE 10.3 for use as a dhcp server.  Bare bones - just ssh,
> dhcp and little else.   BIOS set to allow it to run headless.
>
>  All seemed fine for a while but it then started to "reject" ssh attempts.
> By "reject" I mean that it presented the "logon as:" prompt and accepted and
> displayed the (valid) username and a newline.   But it then "froze" and did
> not present the password request.   At this time, direct console access was
> also inoperative - no amount of key pressing would get it to "wake up" nor
> were any kernel panic light patterns present on the keyboard.
>
>  I faffed around with it for a while, made sure updates were A-Okay, etc.
> There were no outward signs of distress and nothing in the logs to indicate
> unhappiness.
>
>  Distro unhappy with the hardware for some reason??   Nuked it and loaded
> Debian Etch.   This time I added Apache as much for PHP experimentation as
> anything else.
>
>  Lo and behold, after about 12 hours the same deal - ssh logons present
> username request, echo the typed characters but no subsequent password
> request.   I could, however, get Apache to show its test "It works!" page.
> And a small script running phpinfo also runs.
>
>  I must have gotten to this one "early enough" in the failure mode because
> the keyboard was active.  Able to log on (as root) and found I was able to
> do df, ps but - wait for it! - not top.   Nothing that I can see is flaky in
> the logs.
>
>  I have grabbed the latest memtest86 (inspired by several threads on memory
> here recently) and will hit it with that but it does not "feel" to me like a
> memory fault.   Especially because Apache/PHP are active.
>
>  Why would "top" not run, I wonder?????
>
>  Suggestions appreciated.   Maybe I'll just toss this one in the dumpster,
> but I am intrigued.   CPU failure of some bizarre nature?
>
>  Denis
>

Hard drive failure? Can't read /usr/bin/top as it's not been run
before, but other utilities get cached and therefore are read from RAM
rather than HDD as the system runs..

Same with ssh it's reading some utility that hasn't been launched
before maybe...

Just a guess.
Tomasz