[Techtalk] machine hanging

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

Hi there,

> I have a machine in the lab that loves to hang when I either try scp
> something off of it or plug in a USB stick, or do something intense
> like tell it to rotate the logs. 

CPU overload doesn't crash a machine.
 
> >From what I can figure out, the OS (linux 2.4.31 - debian) is taking
> >up
> 95% of it's partition's space and the logs grow unchecked (though not
> fast enough to really cause _the_ problem).  I suspect that the
> partition being almost full is the essence of my problem... 

Low diskspace doesn't crash a machine neither.

> Other then getting the logs to roll and get back some space, does
> anyone have any ideas of what else I could check? 

I would rather check Memory chips instead, there is no reason that an
intense operation (scp is not that intense) or even heavy file
manipulation (logrotate) would crash your machine.
Instead, all the operations may use up more RAM, and failing to
allocate memory for some kernel resources (like usb hotplug) may crash
your system ...

[...]

> Honestly, I don't know what tempfs is... (I just inherited this
> project after it was sitting still for a year or so...)

Don't bother, it's a kind of filesystem. It is used to handle shared
memory (/dev/shm), so nothing interesting in that direction. 
 
> My guess is that anything intense is overburdening this machine and
> locking it up (I have to do a hard reboot).  I'm not sure how to solve
> this problem, short of a re-install or freeing up some space.  Can I
> repartition it w/ out a re-installing?  Don't think so, but worth
> asking...

Again, I do not think that hard disk space is the issue.
You seem to have loads of ram (1Gb ?), so try reducing memory chips and
see if you still have the problem. You should easily use such a machine
with as low as 128 or 256 Mb ram (hey, this is not a Windows machine).

> I didn't originally configure this machine and I thought it was
> running fine until I asked it to do something more substantial then
> "ls" or "du". 

Try this way first, I never had a system crashed because of low disk
space (ok, once diskspace is 100% full, I already had issues).

Come back to us once Ram Tested, you may even run a liveCd (knoppix)
and try to run some programs (openoffice) from there, just to be sure
it will fill up your ram correctly without a crash.

Read you soon,

R. Daneel Olivaw,
The Human Robot Inside.