[gentoo-user] MARK

[gentoo-user] MARK

[David Relson]

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.

Re: [gentoo-user] MARK

[Albert Hopkins]

On Sat, 2010-01-16 at 17:08 -0500, David Relson wrote:
> 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 --

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

It's just your syslog popping in occasionally and saying "Hey, I'm still
alive!"  Notice that it occurs (almost) exactly every 20 minutes.

So you probably need to look elsewhere to diagnose your problem.

Re: [gentoo-user] MARK

[David Relson]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:11:54 -0500
Albert Hopkins wrote:

> On Sat, 2010-01-16 at 17:08 -0500, David Relson wrote:
> > 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 --
> 
> > Anybody know what a "--- MARK ---" message mean??
> 
> It's just your syslog popping in occasionally and saying "Hey, I'm
> still alive!"  Notice that it occurs (almost) exactly every 20
> minutes.

Kind of like syslog saying "nobody told me to log anything, so I'll log
something to show I (at the least) am still OK.

> So you probably need to look elsewhere to diagnose your problem.

I suspect some sort of interaction between the 2 known/suspected heavy
users -- VirtualBox and BackupPC.  

Guess it's time for a monitor to snapshot system status every 5 minutes
so that if/when the problem occurs again, there's some info to look at.