[gentoo-user] Re: log messages

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wednesday 17 February 2010 00:36:42 Harry Putnam wrote:
>> Hundreds, maybe thousands of lines like this (wrapped for mail):
>> 
>>   Feb 16 09:38:47 reader kernel: [162289.090685] usb 4-2.1:1.1: uevent
>> 
>>   Feb 16 09:38:48 reader kernel: [162289.467065] hdc: status error:
>>   status=0x00 { }
>> 
>>   Feb 16 09:38:48 reader kernel: [162289.467071] hdc: possibly failed
>>   opcode: 0xa0
>> 
>>   Feb 16 09:38:48 reader kernel: [162289.467079] ide-atapi: hdc:
>>   Strange, packet command initiated yet DRQ isn't asserted
>> 
>> When I noticed this output involving the cdrom I wondered if I might
>> have left something in it but that was not the case.
>
> Do you have hal configured to poll your cdrom drive every two seconds, to see 
> if a disk is inserted? And if so, is the verbosity logging cranked up way 
> higher than it should be?
>
> I haven't personally had to fix this myself (so can't give pointers on where 
> to fix it), but it seems to be a common occurrence judging from posts I see 
> here and at other forums.

I do have hald running, but made no special config regarding cdrom
polling.  At least not on purpose.

The messages do appear to be continuous.  I will execute a reboot soon
but don't want to right now.

Why I'm pondering and following this up, is that I experience a
serious freeze after some unspecified amount of uptime.  Mouse and
keyboard become unresponsive... and eventually the OS cannot be
accessed at all.  

SSH appears to stop and cannot contact remotely either.

This began happening quite some time ago... on a different earlier
install.  I never could see anything in the logs that gave a clue to
why.  

I created a script that ran from cron.  It pinged a remote host, and
logged a unique easily findable string into the log using `logger',
every 5 minutes.  With that I was able to narrow down the time frame
of freeze to within the last 5 minutes (of log lines).

Even then, there was nothing to indicate a problem.  This was an OS
that had been running a very long time with upgrade after upgrade.

Though I hated having to rebuild all the customizations etc, I finally
completely reinstalled from scratch hoping to catch the problem with
the shotgun approach.

In that earlier OS there were no log messages regarding hdc being
generated (by the way).

Shortly after completing the new install and a couple of weeks of
getting setup the way I wanted, I began to experience the freezes
again.

I have caught the freeze in the early stages before completely losing
the network when just mouse and keyboard became unresponsive, was able
to ssh in and noticed that restarting hald held off the freeze for
some (again unspecified) amount of time.

So cutting the lengthy narrative down a bit, and briefly put, I'm
looking for anything unusual that is causing this.  The hdc messages
is the only odd thing I'm seeing.

Something appears to be jamming up the hal layer somehow, but not
leaving findable tracks.  At least not findable by an someone with
many yrs experience with linux but not much real debugging of
complicated problems under his belt.