How did my system crash?

masseya · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 9:13 pm Post subject: How did my system crash?

I came back to my system after being away for a few hours. It was dead locked. The keyboard was not responsive and it required a physical reboot. It was also beeping (via the terminal bell..) repeatedly. This sounded like someone holding down the backspace key at a terminal prompt in bash only a little bit shorter time between the beeps.

I think this is because there's a screensaver availible in xscreensaver that it randomly landed on that isn't compatible with my system. I have xscreensaver set to randomly choose a screensaver from their set. I'm also using nvidia's opengl and drivers and stuff on my GeForce 2 MX (32mb). How do I find the offending screensaver so I can remove it? How do I verify that a screensaver was in fact at fault? I've looked at the log files, but none of them seem all that promising. Please let me know if I should post more information about the problem.

TIA..
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rac · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 9:22 pm Post subject:

It's a bit hard to do postmortems on lockups. One thing you can try is to compile support for the magic SysRq key into your kernel, and then you can use it to get some debugging information theoretically even when everything is locked up.

If it's repeatable, you can also do a long-term binary search / Monte Carlo approach. Divide the screensavers into two sets, take set A out. Run for a while. If no crash, switch to set B. Once you get a crash, you can either continue subdividing B into B1 and B2, or you could just decide to stick with set A.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

You could also try manualy activating each screensaver.
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masseya · Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 10:05 pm Post subject:

There's a lot of possible screensavers. I was hoping to avoid testing them all. I will probably just take it off random for now and assign something I know works. I'll go through all the others later. I just get bored with the same screen saver all the time. If anyone knows a better way to test them (non-manual) I'm interested to hear it.
_________________
if i never try anything, i never learn anything..
if i never take a risk, i stay where i am..

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

You could probably write a short script if you know where all of the screensavers are.
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