I have a new system running Lenny, amd64 architecture and 8 core Xeon chips. It has been crashing regularly, often after less than 24 hours uptime.
There are indications the problem might be related to the ath5k wireless driver; details below. Google shows ath5k oops has lots of hits, but they seem to concern errors loading or unloading the driver. Could the kernel or Debian be loading or unloading this, or any other, driver without user intervention? The crashes are particularly frustrating because there is generally no indication in the logs of their cause. I have routed the logs to another machine, but they still doesn't show anything. We've been unable to get a serial console working. The system ran memtest+ without error for several days; we pulled the disks and put on a different OS (CentOS?) and that ran for a couple of days too. Any other ideas about what could be causing this, or at least how we could get debug information? We suspected some anacron triggered job might be causing trouble. Is there a way to find out what jobs will be run when, or at least getting them logged when they start? WIRELESS DETAILS The system has a wireless card because of local network policies; it also has ethernet. The best evidence that the driver is the culprit is that since blacklisting and modprobe -r ath5k almost 5 days ago, the system has been up. We tried this because once, but only once, the logs showed that driver crashing 10--20 minutes before a crash. Our wireless network has a password, and I have yet to configure my machine to use it. For both these reasons it seemed unlikely that the wireless was the culprit, but we were out of ideas. CRASH DETAILS By crashing I mean that when I come in the power is on but the screen is black (I think not getting a signal); there's no response to the keyboard or mouse (including VT switching or restart sequences); and it can't be reached over the network. The system needs a hardware reset. OTHER SUSPECTS The disk setup is complex. There are 2 identical hard drives, with 3 partitions each. The 2 first partitions are combined with software RAID 1, as are the 2 3rd partitions. The result is 2 separate md devices. The 2 2nd partitions are non-RAID swap. The md device from the 3rd partitions is under LVM, and some of the LVM volumes are LUKS password encrypted. Swap is random encrypted. One swap partition was initially setup as LUKS encrypted, a mistake I later fixed. The partitions were already on the disks; otherwise setup was through the released Lenny installer. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org