Guest oberon Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 Well, this can be a very common question, but I was unable to find any answer by searching the past messages. Several times I was doing something peacefully - last time, for example, I was browsing the list of available packages, choosing what else to install, in that... RpmDrake? Suddenly the system hanged and didn't react any key combinations (I tried Ctrl + Alt + Backspace and many others) or mouse clicks, but the mouse pointer was moving. I left it for half an hour, but nothing changed. I never had anything like this in Windows XP, and even if some application hanged, I could easily kill it in the Application Manager. Is there something like this in Mandrake? Although I guess it could be the desktop which hangs... Anyway, how can I avoid hitting the 'Reset' button? Every time I do this, I have finally to reinstall Mandrake, otherwise, if I 'repair' the file system while it loads, desktop cannot start. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 you still haven't updated I assume (since you're delaying that till I update the updates ISO....) in which case this issue may be fixed with the update, but no promises ;-) did you check log files to see if there are any errors? (there's a log viewer in MCC) is there any specific program that may have been running at that time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=4496 It has never worked for me......when I hang it really hangs including the keyboard, but.....it exist for a reason...may work for you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=4496It has never worked for me......when I hang it really hangs including the keyboard, but.....it exist for a reason...may work for you. ah yes, Raising Skinny Elepants Is Utterly Boring.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 Implementing the steps which you, gentlemen, advised me, I had three hangups :) , so that there were enough opportunities to try the 'Skinny Elephants' routine. I saw some reaction only after <Alt><SysRq><i> when the monitor picture was replaced by some coloured mess, and <Alt><SysRq><b>, when the system rebooted. I think now that I should wait longer between the key presses, but anyway I didn't notice any hard drive activity after them. As a result, after reboot I saw, when the system was loading, a message that it was shutdown uncleanly and a proposal to run file system integrity check. But who knows what was the chicken and what was the egg, since this happened already after a couple of hangs. Now it is a good time to reinstall the system again... No, I didn't notice any connection with some program - it hanged when I was using Konqueror, Galeon, RpmDrake, LogDrake... But what i think now is that previously the crashes were not so often. They happened only when I used the default Shell in KDE to run some commands like ifup, ifdown, trying to set up the Internet connection. But in GNOME's Terminal everything went fine. Now it crashes just every time, and the only difference which I see is that I started to switch on the firewall during the installation. Next time I'll try to leave it switched off and see what will happen... About the error reports in the logs. I made a search by the 'error' word. The most frequently repeated message is this: Jul 10 18:28:55 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: 10.120.0.1 sent an invalid ICMP error to a broadcast. This message was issued every few minutes, but sometimes twice in a minute. 10.120.0.1 is the Gateway which I set manually among other parameters to get the Internet access (after 3 weeks of attempts). Is it wrong? Can this create a hangup? The second message repeated periodically (but not so frequently) is this: Jul 10 18:28:28 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: usbdevfs: remount parameter error And the third is this: Jul 10 19:01:10 alexandr-a2eetr msec: changed mode of /var/log/httpd/ssl_error_log from 644 to 640 And this is all, there were no other messages with the word 'error' in them. Now I am going to reinstall the system again, leaving firewall switched off... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 No, it wasn't firewall. I reinstalled, tried also to live the 'gateway' blank, but it didn't work, and came here to post a message. The system hanged in the middle of a word. Skinny Elephants were applied with the same fantastic result... Now I shall wait for the updates in a hope that they will solve my problem. If I'll be able to install them before the system hangs. :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 this is odd...very odd...lets get those updates installed and then see if we can get it working. what kind of internet connection are you using? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 It is ADSL. You can see the long story of it's setting up here: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=5932 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 Hi Oberon. This only works if you have another PC but one way is to telnet/ssh into the offending box and find whats wrong and kill the process. This only applies if the probelm is at a certain level...beyond which its the power button or the updates. Anyway ·... If you can telnet/ssh/rlogin into the box (windows has telnet form the command prompt type telnet ipaddress of machine. Anyway first you need to be able to ping it from anpther machine, if this doesn't work your with the elephants again !!! Anyway, if you can telnet .... you can try and find out whats hanging by typing top. If the process at the top is some rouge process you can kill it by noting its PID (use q to quit top) and then kill -5 <PID> ... this asks it to shutdown cleanly.... if it persists you can be more forcefull and use kill -9 <PID> If this happens to be a kernel process it will kill your machine .... thiis isn't generally a good idea ... you should shutdown properly but it won't do any more damage than the power button :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qnr Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 I was going to mention the telnet/ssh but held off for a while since it appeared that part of the problem was network related anyway, which would seem to preclude a remote solution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted July 10, 2003 Report Share Posted July 10, 2003 funny, i thought the same then thought.... well, at least we know if its a nw prob or the devfs .... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 11, 2003 Report Share Posted July 11, 2003 Thanks, gentlemen, but right now I haven't got another computer to connect - just an ancient laptop which cannot be networked... But I'll keep this advice for future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted July 11, 2003 Report Share Posted July 11, 2003 When your system hangs, so you see your Caps lock light blinking? I doubt it, since you got some kind of response to the elephants, allbeit, not a good one. If the caps lock light is blinking, it means you've had a kernel Oops, so you can search /var/log/messages for Oops. Also, not all error messages in /var/log/messages will have the word 'error' in them, so you really want to use logdrake and leave the search field blank when you click 'search' and then just try to scroll down to about the time you had this problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 11, 2003 Report Share Posted July 11, 2003 I don't understand this Mandrake... Today I was using it for an hour, every minute waiting that it will hang, but it didn't. I performed all kinds of things at which it hanged previously, but it didn't. I even was reading this forum, although Mandrake definitely doesn't like it :wink:: it hanged a couple of times when I was going to post a message here. But when I finally, after a hour, decided to report my success and opened a Konqueror window, it hanged immediately. No, it doesn't like Mandrakeusers... No, my Caps Lock doesn't blink. I saved all the logs and looked them throug noting specifically the end o the yesterday's session, which was a hangup. Here is the only meaningful passage which I met twice. As I understand, it shows my 'Skinny Elephants' manipulations and the lines which were recorded just before them: Jul 10 22:17:27 alexandr-a2eetr network: Bringing up interface eth0: succeeded Jul 10 22:17:33 alexandr-a2eetr su(pam_unix)[2453]: session closed for user root Jul 10 22:19:12 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: 10.120.0.1 sent an invalid ICMP error to a broadcast. Jul 10 22:19:12 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: 10.120.0.1 sent an invalid ICMP error to a broadcast. Jul 10 22:23:10 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: SysRq : Keyboard mode set to XLATE Jul 10 22:23:11 alexandr-a2eetr last message repeated 2 times Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: SysRq : Emergency Sync Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: Syncing device 03:45 ... OK Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: Syncing device 03:47 ... OK Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: Syncing device 03:01 ... OK Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: Syncing device 03:41 ... OK Jul 10 22:23:51 alexandr-a2eetr kernel: Done. Jul 10 22:24:24 alexandr-a2eetr exiting on signal 15 Again those ICMP thingies... But they were also in today's logs, long before the hang. I'll check the today's logs later, to see what accompanied the last hangup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest oberon Posted July 11, 2003 Report Share Posted July 11, 2003 Now I know it for sure that the reason of hangups isn't reflected in logs. There is just what I was doing before - browsing the list of available packages - then I launched the Konqueror, which isn't reflected there, and then my 'elephants' go. By the way, I am writing this under Mandrake. Will I be able to post it? :? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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