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I have a Linux server I've just set up, debian squeeze, 2.6.32-5-amd64, and over the past week it's rebooted three times, twice in one day. There was no power outage that I am aware of (and it's running on a UPS), and there are no errors in syslog, besides a few to-be-expected ones on bootup to do with clearing out entries in the ext4 journal due to the unclean shutdown.

What steps can I take to determine the cause of the reboots? Is there a way to get it to hang instead of rebooting, so I can copy stack traces or something off the screen? Any way to increase debug messages, or get it to dump things to disk, or something?

3 Answers 3

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That may be some hardware problem; the most common are failed RAM and overheating. You could install mbmon to monitor motherboard and CPU temperature; and runmemtest86+ to check your RAM and CPU cache.

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  • mbmon gives "No Hardware Monitor found" but after upgrading my kernel, lm-sensors gives CPU core temperature now, which seems reasonable (average around 35 C, goes up to 55C if I run a benchmark on all cores). Will try memtest when I figure out how to run it on a remote server.
    – davr
    Jun 2, 2011 at 14:36
  • You can't run it directly on a remote server, but there's a linux equivalent you may run without rebooting (though it's not as thorough): memtester.
    – wazoox
    Jun 4, 2011 at 15:11
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There is a chance it is a 'kernel panic' and a kernel 'oops' message is sent to the console before the reboot. The kernel can be configured to reboot on 'panic' or to stay on. Check:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/panic

If it is non-zero try putting 0 there (you can do it directly writting to the file, via /etc/sysctl.conf which is usually parsed on boot, or using the sysctl utility), this should stop rebooting. If it is already 0, then the reboots are not caused by kernel panics.

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  • It's 0...so must be something else then. Thanks for the tip.
    – davr
    Jun 3, 2011 at 5:20
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Check the output of last. Look for reboot. Try to correlate that with who was logged in if anyone and who has superuser privileges. If it is not a user, you may have power/heat issues or some type of kernel panic causing issues. Try to rule those out one by one.

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  • Nobody else but me logging in (double checked the IP even from last). It's on an UPS, so I don't think it's a power issue, unless the server power supply is failing. I don't think it's heat issues, at least the server is not heavily loaded, and the current temperature is quite low (CPU at 36C), I'll start logging the temperature though.
    – davr
    Jun 2, 2011 at 5:42
  • Is there a way to get it to dump the kernel panic to disk or to screen? I'm worried that it's just rebooting and not saving the error messages anywhere. Is there a 'debug mode' or something I can enable?
    – davr
    Jun 2, 2011 at 5:43
  • A kernel panic is very unlikely - hardware trouble such as an overheating processor or memory errors is much more likely. Jun 2, 2011 at 11:26
  • how to verify that? I have the same problem but I need to convince my provider that something is hardware? Too much reboot may be a software issue.
    – user4234
    Jul 25, 2013 at 4:22

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