I have been doing some searching and am still searching.
But figured I would throw this out for some help at the same time.

One of my secondary machines, Actually the main FE/SBE we watch TV from has started acting up. Two nights ago it kicked out and locked up. When I got it restarted it would only go to a lite blue screen with a mouse pointer in the center, right after Nvidia settings are loaded in the startup sequence.

I can move the pointer around but no control via it or the keyboard.

In looking in Top I see this:

top - 08:14:45 up 20 min, 2 users, load average: 1.02, 1.17, 0.93
Tasks: 77 total, 3 running, 74 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 99.7% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1033020k total, 230116k used, 802904k free, 8168k buffers
Swap: 1953496k total, 0k used, 1953496k free, 118684k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4700 root 25 0 32188 20m 3072 R 99.2 2.0 12:52.00 XFree86
2733 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:03.33 lirc_pvr150

Xfree86 seems to lead to GDM. If I try to restart that process it takes a bit then goes back to the same screen.

If I kill it I go back to a basic desktop that is going to recycle back to the mythfrontend in 30 seconds.

I seem to have full control of the box at that point, but as soon as GDM tries to reload I lose frontend control and Xfree86 goes to high CPU again.

I have looked around the logs and just don't see anything out of the norm.

Disk space seems ok too.
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4.6G 2.3G 2.2G 51% /
/dev/hda3 13G 99M 13G 1% /myth
mythtv:/myth 590G 443G 148G 76% /mnt/mythtv

Update my MBE reports that this machine is available to record. I tested that by shutting down my 3rd box which makes this the lowest priority tuner and it allows me to watch live TV from it to my MBE. So everything but the FE is working.

Suggestions?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5
MBE: AMD64 3400+, K8N Neo4 Plat., 1Gig, Asus Extreme N6200, 320G pata, 2x320Gsata, 750Gsata, PVR-150 Retail w/Blaster
SBE: AMD XP2000, GA 7ZMMH, 1 Gig, XFX 256M 6200, 20 Gig, PVR-150 Retail w/Blaster
SBE: AMD Dur1800, 512M, PVR500

If you start the frontend from an xterm, you get?

Cecil,
Not quite sure I know how to do what you asked me to do. Very much a newbie but I am learning quick.

What I did do, After I posted this and sure I wasn't gaining any ground, I killed the runaway process.
Essentially all I had was a black TV screen no responses. I left it sitting that way all day until about 5 minutes ago.

I was trying to get an answer to your question, I tried bringing up a console on the box, via Alt-X and Alt-F1, or 2 nothing, no response. I logged in via Webmin and it was alive but nothing significant going on. I ran /etc/init.d/gdm start and it told me gdm was already running. Then I ran /etc/init.d/gdm restart and it came back to life.

CPU utilization started at about 30% and drifted back down to negligible. I have display back and everything seems to be working.

All these strange issues seem to happen whenever I have "no time" but then you seem to be aware of that issue too.

I'll keep watching it, what might I be looking for?

If you start the frontend from an xterm and it fails, you should see long text in the xterm. This should give some clue as to why it is failing.

Well the system ran last night then when I got up this am to watch news the frontend was frozen. At that point I did a quick check and it was not in a runaway process status instead it essentially was idle with Frontend consuming about 3% resources.

I left it like that, because I didn't have time to mess with it. It would not respond to allow me into the frontend, I could only get into SSH and Webmin on the backend.

This afternoon when I came home the Process I described above was again in a runaway status and the system would not respond. I cannot vnc in at this point but I can SSH into it and Webmin into it.

I killed the process and then restarted gdm, it works fine again.

What is another step I can take to troubleshoot this?
When I kill the process I go to a Black screen at the machine and cannot get it to respond to let me into a console.

I am running R5C7 at this point FWIW. This has been basically rock solid for months other than my occasional fat fingered mistakes.
It has been working well, I had to force a power down a couple of days back because it lost the MBE and locked up. Other than that no problems with any of the system.

Update I decided to run a restart of the system and it froze loading the display. It is sort of a blue screen that comes in right after the Nvidia settings are loaded and the screen resizes.

Earlier this week we were experiencing a lightning storm, I too everything offline at that time and shut it down as they are right here and no amount of protection saves that. Anyway in digging back I find this in my syslog file. during the startup sequence.


I see that message a couple of other times in my backdated Logfiles but not in the latest one that I just restarted with and now have a frozen display

While it was frozen I ran from putty /etc/init.d/gdm restart and it took about 20 secs to "Stop" then it started and I am back working for now.

Well I believe I have solved the issue. I reset my logfile rotation last night just so I could get up and check it out before it rotated Logfiles.

Well it was froze again.
No amount of coercing it would bring it out of this state.
I was able to do a halt through ssh and then waited and started it back up. It was still frozen when it started.

So I decided to load the CD as a frontend only, I wouldn't have my tuner that way, but at least I could verify the hd config had a problem or the hardware.

Well it wouldn't load the Front end, would just kind of freeze. I know it worked before.
Next I put it into the Memtest from the CD and just walked away. It ran 11 hours and passed every test.

Well then I restarted noticed a strange flicker as it went from video bios to mobo post. It went on up and even booted all the way to the front end.

I took it back down then went in and check health status, it was a little warm but not as hot as I have seen it. Really need to get to monitoring through rrd on this box.

Anyway, I restarted it again , saw that strange strobe during bootup and it froze.

I had just rebuilt another box so I had an Nvidia 6200 Passive cooled card setting around, opened the box, noticed the video chip on this MX4400 was somewhat warmer, Warmer than I would like it. Replaced it with the 6200 and moved a couple of other cards around for better airflow.

Started it back up and it absolutely came straight to life. It seems responsive and everything. Also I notice a considerably sharper picture with the Nvidia GeForce 6200. I think I saw TJC mention once that the video on these cards was somewhat more stable probably because of the DVI socket on board. Anyway even with my SDTV I notice a huge improvement.

I'll report back in the next couple of days if this was the "Fix"

Thanks for the help everyone.

Well I believe I have solved the issue. I reset my logfile rotation last night just so I could get up and check it out before it rotated Logfiles.

Well it was froze again.
No amount of coercing it would bring it out of this state.
I was able to do a halt through ssh and then waited and started it back up. It was still frozen when it started.

So I decided to load the CD as a frontend only, I wouldn't have my tuner that way, but at least I could verify the hd config had a problem or the hardware.

Well it wouldn't load the Front end, would just kind of freeze. I know it worked before.
Next I put it into the Memtest from the CD and just walked away. It ran 11 hours and passed every test.

Well then I restarted noticed a strange flicker as it went from video bios to mobo post. It went on up and even booted all the way to the front end. so quick like I ran a Backup of the system.

I took it back down then went in and check bios report of pc health status, it was a little warm but not as hot as I have seen it. Really need to get to monitoring through rrd on this box.

Anyway, I restarted it again , saw that strange flicker during bootup and it froze.

I had just rebuilt another box so I had an Nvidia 6200 Passive cooled card setting around, opened the box, noticed the video chip on this MX4400 was somewhat warmer, Warmer than I would like it. Replaced it with the 6200 and moved a couple of other cards around for better airflow.

Started it back up and it absolutely came straight to life. It seems responsive and everything. Also I notice a considerably sharper picture with the Nvidia GeForce 6200. I think I saw TJC mention once that the video on these cards was somewhat more stable probably because of the DVI socket on board. Anyway even with my SDTV I notice a huge improvement.

I'll report back in the next couple of days if this was the "Fix"

Thanks for the help everyone.

Well it seems I have fixed the machine for now.
Really helps the WAF.

Actually came down to the video card not having enough Airflow I believe and that causing it to throw some errors and freeze the display.

I mentioned above seeing some strange flashes when it booted, but more importantly when I went in and dug around the logs I found a couple of nvrm errors.

Here is one on bootup


Here is another that seemed to surface around the time it would freeze (although I can't confirm that)


Google is a great resource expecially google.com/linux

When I started searching there I found many references to the NVRM: Xid errors. it seems in reading my error (0001:000) pertains to the slot my video card shows up in , and the 8 or 13 seems to be a specific error on the card.

What most topics were saying is this is relative to a driver issue, although I didn't find posts from even nvidia to confirm that but I did find one poster that discussed heat issues and nvidia cards throwing errors because of it.

Well I already knew this box runs hotter than I would like, working to fix that, but I never imagined how hot in there. Anyway, I changed the card and moved some stuff around and the whole shebang is working, no nvrm errors on start up and no lockups.