[gentoo-user] MARK

[David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com>]

From /var/log/messages:

  Jan 16 01:35:27 osage -- MARK --
  Jan 16 01:55:37 osage -- MARK --
  Jan 16 02:15:44 osage -- MARK --
  Jan 16 02:35:52 osage -- MARK --
  Jan 16 02:55:58 osage -- MARK --

This morning my computer was foobar'd (after 200+ days uptime).

Initially the screen was black -- not surprising as that's the screen
saver mode.

Moving the mouse didn't wake up Gnome.  Pushing a key caused the screen
to refresh (after more seconds than is normal) and show the VirtualBox
session I was using last night.

On the down side, moving the mouse didn't move the on-screen cursor.
There was no apparent keyboard response, and I didn't think to try the
magic SYSRQ key.

Switching to a second machine, I could ping the first machine just
fine.  However ssh didn't produce a prompt.  I let the connect attempt
continue while I ate breakfast (say 15 or 20 minutes).

So, I pushed the big red switch, rebooted the machine, then looked
at /var/log/messages.  From 01:35 until 06:35, at intervals of 20
minutes and 7 seconds, there were MARK messages as shown above.  In
addition to that there was only 1 statistics message from syslog-ng.

Anybody know what a "--- MARK ---" message mean??

Regards,

David

P.S. The machine is an AMD64 running 2.6.28-gentoo-r5.  Overnight,
VirtualBox was running (though in an idle state) and (probably)
BackupPC was also running.  Other than those 2 processes, nothing of
significance was running, AFAIK.