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Hi Denis,<br>
<br>
I've commonly seen this when the HDD is starting to fail, developing bad sectors.<br>
<br>
Grab the Ultimate Boot CD [1] and test the HDD using the relevant vendor's utility.<br>
<br>
Cheers; Dan<br>
<br>
[1] http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">On Wed Apr 9 13:39 , Denis Brown <dsbrown@cyllene.uwa.edu.au> sent:<br>
</dsbrown@cyllene.uwa.edu.au></span><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(245, 245, 245); margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 0px;">Hello PLUG list members,
<br>
<br>
One for the memoires I suspect :-)
<br>
<br>
An old IBM chassis Pentium 4 with previously reliable hardware. Nuked it
<br>
and loaded openSuSE 10.3 for use as a dhcp server. Bare bones - just ssh,
<br>
dhcp and little else. BIOS set to allow it to run headless.
<br>
<br>
All seemed fine for a while but it then started to "reject" ssh
<br>
attempts. By "reject" I mean that it presented the "logon as:" prompt and
<br>
accepted and displayed the (valid) username and a newline. But it then
<br>
"froze" and did not present the password request. At this time, direct
<br>
console access was also inoperative - no amount of key pressing would get
<br>
it to "wake up" nor were any kernel panic light patterns present on the
<br>
keyboard.
<br>
<br>
I faffed around with it for a while, made sure updates were A-Okay,
<br>
etc. There were no outward signs of distress and nothing in the logs to
<br>
indicate unhappiness.
<br>
<br>
Distro unhappy with the hardware for some reason?? Nuked it and loaded
<br>
Debian Etch. This time I added Apache as much for PHP experimentation as
<br>
anything else.
<br>
<br>
Lo and behold, after about 12 hours the same deal - ssh logons present
<br>
username request, echo the typed characters but no subsequent password
<br>
request. I could, however, get Apache to show its test "It works!"
<br>
page. And a small script running phpinfo also runs.
<br>
<br>
I must have gotten to this one "early enough" in the failure mode because
<br>
the keyboard was active. Able to log on (as root) and found I was able to
<br>
do df, ps but - wait for it! - not top. Nothing that I can see is flaky
<br>
in the logs.
<br>
<br>
I have grabbed the latest memtest86 (inspired by several threads on memory
<br>
here recently) and will hit it with that but it does not "feel" to me like
<br>
a memory fault. Especially because Apache/PHP are active.
<br>
<br>
Why would "top" not run, I wonder?????
<br>
<br>
Suggestions appreciated. Maybe I'll just toss this one in the dumpster,
<br>
but I am intrigued. CPU failure of some bizarre nature?
<br>
<br>
Denis
<br>
<br>
<br>
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<br>
</blockquote><BR></HTML>