Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random - FINALE
Hi All, Well, needed to have this up and running in the smallest amount of time, the new convert (read 'wife') wanted it back working and I'd spent a day (when I was supposed to be working around the house and playing with the kids) trying to get it to work...so - new motherboard. A day is long time in my life at the moment :)) Trying to find something that would take my 3Ghz LGA775 CPU, had at least three PCI slots, two IDE slots and that would take DDR (not DDR2) RAM was a bit of a test. Finally settled on an ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 and the machine has now been up and running for two days without a pause. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and advice. I am very grateful for, and appreciative of, your assistance and time. My apologies if I've left anyone off the list. Regards, Patrick -- Registered GNU/Linux User 368634 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
Yeah I have seen that happen as well. Its typically something easy to test so give it a try. (ie swap PSU with another box) Heracles wrote: Hi Elliot, I may be way off here, but I had the same problem a while ago. It turned out that the power supply had a fault which started as random and then eventually the machine would not boot; whenever something caused a spike like when a HDD firing up it couldn't cope. It was hard to diagnose. I fixed the problem by getting a better quality power supply. Heracles elliott-brennan wrote: Hi all, I have Mythbuntu running on a 3Ghz P4 1.5G RAM, 500G HDD, two PVR-150 video cards and a 128mb nVidia card. On the odd occasion the machine decides to reboot, for no particular reason. Tonight, for instance, my wife was watching the ABC and the machine just borked and rebooted. She wasn't 'doing' anything and the machine was doing nothing but showing the TV...no additional work. It's done this irregularly (eg. not every day and not at the same time) and I can't work out a pattern. Last week I had serious problems getting it to stay alive for more than 10 minutes. I finally replaced the BIOS battery and it was fine. Can anyone suggest something I should look at? Thanks in advance. Regards, Patrick -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
Hi Elliot, I may be way off here, but I had the same problem a while ago. It turned out that the power supply had a fault which started as random and then eventually the machine would not boot; whenever something caused a spike like when a HDD firing up it couldn't cope. It was hard to diagnose. I fixed the problem by getting a better quality power supply. Heracles elliott-brennan wrote: Hi all, I have Mythbuntu running on a 3Ghz P4 1.5G RAM, 500G HDD, two PVR-150 video cards and a 128mb nVidia card. On the odd occasion the machine decides to reboot, for no particular reason. Tonight, for instance, my wife was watching the ABC and the machine just borked and rebooted. She wasn't 'doing' anything and the machine was doing nothing but showing the TV...no additional work. It's done this irregularly (eg. not every day and not at the same time) and I can't work out a pattern. Last week I had serious problems getting it to stay alive for more than 10 minutes. I finally replaced the BIOS battery and it was fine. Can anyone suggest something I should look at? Thanks in advance. Regards, Patrick -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
elliott-brennan wrote: Hi all, I have Mythbuntu running on a 3Ghz P4 1.5G RAM, 500G HDD, two PVR-150 video cards and a 128mb nVidia card. On the odd occasion the machine decides to reboot, for no particular reason. Tonight, for instance, my wife was watching the ABC and the machine just borked and rebooted. She wasn't 'doing' anything and the machine was doing nothing but showing the TV...no additional work. It's done this irregularly (eg. not every day and not at the same time) and I can't work out a pattern. Last week I had serious problems getting it to stay alive for more than 10 minutes. I finally replaced the BIOS battery and it was fine. Can anyone suggest something I should look at? Thanks in advance. Regards, Patrick Anything interesting in the logs? otherwise, potentially ram, or given its a little old, motherboard capacitors. Last week was also really hot which would affect things somewhat badly. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
ditto that and check seating cooling (ie blow out dust from CPU heatsink, re-apply that nice carcinogenic heatsink compound you get from nerd shops). There's a product CRC Switch Cleaner Lubricant which greatly improves contact problems though I suspect in the longer term you get more dust stuck down. Kevin. On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 22:24 +1100, Jake Anderson wrote: elliott-brennan wrote: On the odd occasion the machine decides to reboot, Anything interesting in the logs? otherwise, potentially ram, or given its a little old, motherboard capacitors. Last week was also really hot which would affect things somewhat badly. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
Hi Ben, I'm running a brand new Zalman CNPS7700 CPU fan along with a brand new Seasonic S12II 430W PSU with a 120mm fan in the machine. I checked the box when it keeled over while my wife was watching the telly and it was rather hot. It could be the box is not pushed far enough back in the TV cabinet (big mother which holds everything) so the air may not have been able to move around properly regardless of the fans. I've moved it right to the back (I had already cut a hole out of the rear of the cabinet to allow the box to vent properly - wife was not amused). I'm running memtest86+ at the moment and will check what it says tomorrow morning. The machine has generally been running well and so these odd self-reboots are quite odd. ... it would be difficult to determine I guess, until it completely fails. Sad but true. Thanks for the advice. Regards, Patrick Ben's Linux wrote: Hi, Just a simple thought. Try a Live CD for a while and see if it happens. If it does not then its not your hard drive and related software but your motherboard , RAM or power supply. Obviously if it still happens change the power supply or RAM and prove it. Just a thought as it would be difficult to determine I guess, until it completely fails. Ben - Original Message - From: elliott-brennan m...@elliott-brennan.id.au To: slug@slug.org.au Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:02 PM Subject: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random Hi all, I have Mythbuntu running on a 3Ghz P4 1.5G RAM, 500G HDD, two PVR-150 video cards and a 128mb nVidia card. On the odd occasion the machine decides to reboot, for no particular reason. Tonight, for instance, my wife was watching the ABC and the machine just borked and rebooted. She wasn't 'doing' anything and the machine was doing nothing but showing the TV...no additional work. It's done this irregularly (eg. not every day and not at the same time) and I can't work out a pattern. Last week I had serious problems getting it to stay alive for more than 10 minutes. I finally replaced the BIOS battery and it was fine. Can anyone suggest something I should look at? Thanks in advance. Regards, Patrick -- Registered GNU/Linux User 368634 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- Registered GNU/Linux User 368634 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
Hi Jake Anything interesting in the logs? otherwise, potentially ram, or given its a little old, motherboard capacitors. Last week was also really hot which would affect things somewhat badly. I've had a look at the capacitors (physical view) and they seem fine (superficial, I know). I'm running a brand new Zalman CNPS7700 CPU fan along with a brand new Seasonic S12II 430W PSU. Regarding logs, if you mean: /var/log/messages I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for to be honest and I'm loath to post the whole thing - it's s bloody big. Any hints as to what specifically to look for :)) Regards, Patrick -- Registered GNU/Linux User 368634 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
On Saturday 21 February 2009 02:31:08 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: I'm running a brand new Zalman CNPS7700 CPU fan along with a brand new Seasonic S12II 430W PSU with a 120mm fan in the machine. I checked the box when it keeled over while my wife was watching the telly and it was rather hot. It could be the box is not pushed far enough back in the TV cabinet (big mother which holds everything) so the air may not have been able to move around properly regardless of the fans. I've moved it right to the back (I had already cut a hole out of the rear of the cabinet to allow the box to vent properly - wife was not amused). I'm running memtest86+ at the moment and will check what it says tomorrow morning. The machine has generally been running well and so these odd self-reboots are quite odd. ... it would be difficult to determine I guess, until it completely fails. Sad but true. When the machine fails, or at your leisure reboot, enter the BIOS screen, Health and check the temperatures. My myth machine (DNS, MAIL, WWW, DHCP) is on 24/7 so I was paranoid about power consumption. It runs cool, and by stopwatch at the meter it is 30W. Right now Perth is 30C (it's only 9:15) and CPU temp is 39C Last time (long ago) I checked a P4 it was over 130W so say 100W extra == 870 KwH pa == $105. Easy to justify a new mobo at $80 ish and my 2 DVICO tuner backend worked fine with a sempron processor ($25 ish) although I use a model name : AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual Core Processor BE-2300 because DB stuff is quicker (myth uses the DB a lot so after years you get the occasional 2 sec pause when skipping) James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu box shutting down at random
This one time, at band camp, elliott-brennan wrote: I checked the box when it keeled over while my wife was watching the telly and it was rather hot. It could be the box is not pushed far enough back in the TV cabinet (big mother which holds everything) so the air may not have been able to move around properly regardless of the fans. I've moved it right to the back (I had already cut a hole out of the rear of the cabinet to allow the box to vent properly - wife was not amused). Install the lm-sensors and sensord package. Then (as root) run sensors-detect. It'll test for available temperature sensors on your machine and set up the appropriate lines in /etc/modules.conf to load the right modules (first time you'll need to modprobe them yourself). Then type sensors to see all the output. For example, here's part of my output: adm1023-i2c-2-18 Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at dcd0 Board Temp: +37.0°C (low = -128.0°C, high = +127.0°C) CPU Temp:+41.0°C (low = -128.0°C, high = +105.0°C) Fiddle around with /etc/sensors3.conf to set maximum temperatures, and actions when the maximums are exceeded (like, get it to send you an email?). -- Rev Simon Rumble si...@rumble.net www.rumble.net The Tourist Engineer Because geeks travel too. http://engineer.openguides.org/ Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly. - Simeon Strunsky -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
