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I have a server which is hanging more times than I would like, are there any logs in particular that would be worth examining to determine the reason?

/var/log/messages has nothing of note /var/log/dmesg is also not useful.

The machine hangs in that there is no response from a network ping, nothing on the console screen but it still has power. You have to press and hold the off button to turn it off before it will turn on.

The main service is samba (it is the domain controller), also pptp, dhcp and bind.

It seems it was a problem with the power supply. Thanks for spending the time answering and for the suggestion.

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What services are you running? Is there any interesting in dmesg output (it's different from /var/log/dmesg). Do you have physical access to this server? – quanta Aug 15 '11 at 14:11
@quanta I have access to the machine, there is nothing unusual from dmesg, certainly nothing fail ling. – Tim the Enchanter Aug 15 '11 at 14:32
Could you please show us some output from top command (or atop, htop) sort by CPU usage, disk I/O, memory, ... – quanta Aug 15 '11 at 14:54
Sounds like a hardware problem. Do you have hardware monitoring tools installed? Otherwise, make sure you have applied all CentOS updates and updated all firmware. – Mark Wagner Aug 15 '11 at 16:25
You might try using the Magic Sysreq keys to get a dump or some more data when it hangs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key – malcolmpdx Aug 15 '11 at 16:46
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I had a similar issue on a CentOS5 box. Try to update your network drivers (if you have a Realtek 8168 based NIC):

rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-5-3.el5.elrepo.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-r8168

And then reboot your machine.

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How do you know the original poster use this driver? – quanta Aug 15 '11 at 14:56
I didn't (my bad). I changed my post to explain it's only for Realtek 8168 based NICs. – Ywa Aug 15 '11 at 14:59
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Can you be a bit more specific about the hangs? Is the machine responsive from the console but loses network access? Any console logs or kernel panic messages? The latter would be on the screen, but possibly not in any log files.

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added description of the hang – Tim the Enchanter Aug 15 '11 at 13:57
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