Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 12 Dec 1996 14:03:39 +0200 (SAT) | From | Louis Mandelstam <> | Subject | ps -axf core dump strangeness |
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Hello -
This one is getting to me and it's being quite a nuisance, so I'm really hoping someone can help me see what I'm missing:
I've got a production server running Red Hat 4.0, with all updates, and kernel 2.0.27 - the problem also showed itself under 2.0.25 - these are the only two kernels I've run on the machine, so I can't say of older kernels behaved.
The system seems to get into a "state" where typing 'ps -axf' will dump core.
ps -af, ps -ax, ps -xf, ps -uxf etc etc all work just fine. Only 'ps -axf' causes a seg fault.
This will go on for a while, then when I try quite a bit later, the problem will be completely gone.
This is procps-1.01-7 from Red Hat.
It *may* be that the problem is related to certain times of the day - starting in the morning, and going away at night. *If* this is the case, it could be either temperature or load related. Since I've no clue what could be happening, I can't go into that any further.
It hasn't been going on that long (new machine) so I can't be certain.
Everything else on the machine is working fine - it's doing some heavy fileserving (NFS and Samba as well as some TFTP), sendmail is running perfectly, kernel compiles work fine etc etc.
There *is* one other strangeness however - some daemons have been dying silently every so often.
The only daemons that have done it to my knowledge have been bootpd and apcd. This happens infrequenctly, maybe once every 3-4 days but still hard to say.
Now core files are to be found when daemons die like this.
Any clues please?
If I can get something to convince me it might be a heat related problem, I'll look into that - somewhat invasive but so is the problem itself. It's just that everything else works so well - I find it hard to believe a hardware level problem would cause 'ps -axf' to segfault, but not 'ps -xf' etc - (the ps story is well tested)
Regards
------------------------------------------------------------------------- L.Mandelstam - System Administrator louis@sacc.org.za S A Council of Churches, PO Box 4921, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa tel:+27-11-492-1380 x114 fax:+27-11-492-1448 mobile: +27-83-229-0712 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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