Crash + Blinking light. What more to do?

[shadowbox]

I was sitting right next to my BubbaII when this happened. Among other things it was hashing a torrent file at the time. Then there was an extended disk read/write (I could hear). After that BubbaII wouldn't respond to ping.

I disconnected the power, waited 30sec, then booted it. The drive spun like a normal boot, the blue light blinking. Then it stopped accessing the disk (after 20sec or so) and just the blinking blue light remains. I can't ping the box.

What are my next steps to diagnosis?

[shadowbox]

Okay, after about 10 mins of inactivity the drive started cherping and BubbaII came back to life.

Code: Select all

Sep 19 10:27:35 shadowbox kernel: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
Sep 19 10:39:59 shadowbox kernel: Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).

Anyone know what happens in this interval?

[carl]

Okay, after about 10 mins of inactivity the drive started cherping and BubbaII came back to life.

Code: Select all

Sep 19 10:27:35 shadowbox kernel: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
Sep 19 10:39:59 shadowbox kernel: Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).

Anyone know what happens in this interval?

What could have happened is that some application used up more memory than physically possible, and thus a large amount of swap space was consumed; this would continue until the system forcefully kill the application when there is no more virtual memory left to consume. Though this is just an hypothesis, and if it's true, I would like to know what process ate all memory.

/Carl

[shadowbox]

I would suspect rtorrent (running under a non-root user process (shell)) ate it all while rehashing a feed (when the item hits 100%). That's all I know of that was going on in system at the time -- other than the usual daemons and possibly fetchmail.