[Nottingham] ironic Xserver failure

[Peter Chang]

Dave wrote:
[snipped]
> I've attached a the friday pm section of var/log/messages, but as
> there were about 4 files worth there I temporarily posted the rest at:
> 
> http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~eaxdrw/root_messages/ 

I had a browse through the logs. There are quite a few unscheduled
reboots plus at least one oops.

> in case they're of any interest.

1) your module configs may need tweaking - there's a few messages such as 

Jul 14 09:19:38 pepdm1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module
sound-slot-1
Jul 14 09:19:38 pepdm1 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module
sound-service-1-0

2) your network seems very flakey:

Jul 14 09:37:06 pepdm1 kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out

3) system reboot at Jul 14 10:05:46, 
Jul 14 12:34:09

4) no firewall

5) something causes lots of timeouts from Jul 14 15:21:19
then a reboot at Jul 14 15:43:30

6) user eaywmjc logs on but alway seems to fail on the on first attempt
as they hit the space bar before typing in their username!

7) user eaxdrw spends two hours logging in and out via ssh (Jul 20
15:59:36)!

8) system reboot at Jul 22 13:14:24

9) system oops at Jul 29 02:50:59 looks like the swap daemon caused it

10) reboot Aug  5 12:06:52 and again at Aug  5 14:15:34 this is followed
by xfs complaining

Aug  5 14:15:45 pepdm1 xfs: cannot establish any listening sockets 

and gdm complaining about the X server

Aug  5 14:15:57 pepdm1 gdm[3150]: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X
error - Restarting :0

then another reboot at Aug  5 14:25:22, same thing happens
and another reboot at Aug  5 16:04:39, then gdm copes

Aug  5 16:06:05 pepdm1 gdm[3107]: deal_with_x_crashes: Running the
XKeepsCrashing script

and a proper shutdown at Aug  5 16:34:16 and reboot at Aug  5 16:35:56

gdm still going wrong, reboot at Aug  5 16:52:35, attempt to fix then
shutdown and reboot at Aug  5 17:00:04

Repeats ad nauseum till home time.

11) Shutdown and reboot at Aug  6 09:07:04, again at Aug  6 12:15:26 and
at Aug  6 12:46:20

12) Shutdown and reboot at Aug  9 09:34:20, at Aug  9 09:41:34, and at Aug
9 09:49:29. Fixed gdm and X server setup?


So my questions and suggestions are

a) what caused those unscheduled reboots? Were you pressing the big button
all the time! You could have just dropped to the console level using
# telinit 3

b) xfs is still not working. Has your /tmp directory and the
/tmp/.font-unix got the correct permissions? 

They should read something akin to

# ll -d /tmp

drwxrwxrwt    8 root     root         4096 Aug 12 19:06 /tmp

and

# ll -a /tmp/.font-unix

drwxrwxrwt    2 xfs      xfs          4096 Jul 16 19:37 /tmp/.font-unix


Peter



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