Console lock-up problem

[Namit]

The console on our HPUX 11 machine was suddenly locked today. I found that the Xerror file, which was just 194 bytes before, had a size of about 2GBs suddenly, thereby chocking up all the disk-space available in /var.

So, can this be the reason of the console-lockup ? I mean, can we get a console locked if the Xserver isn't able to use the /var/dt directory or something ?

Unfortunately I've lost the Xerror file now, but I remember it saying something like having a queue reaching maximum limit or something. When we killed X, everything was back to normal, with Xerror having a size of 74 bytes ( which is quite obvious I think ).

Can someone please help me understand the problem, and refer me to some information on Xerrors etc.

Thanks
Namit

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Namit,

When /var goes 100% pretty much everything will appear to be locked up - including the console. This occurs because many things, the kernel included, want to log to a file somewhere in /var & the system is waiting for the logging to complete.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Namit]

Thanks for the info Jeff. But, what can possibly be the reason for the Xerror file to suddenly eat up 2GBs. Another point to look at here is that the machine was working fine for a few days before suddenly chocking-up the space, so this shouldn't be any setting related problem or something. Please help.

[Namit]

Hi,

In continuation to my query ( which hasn't really seen much response till now ), I have following questions to ask :

1. Is there any change between HP10 and HP11 that might link with this problem ? Because we never found this problem before ( and we were using HP10 then )
2. Is it possible that our applications ( which are quite color-hungry, and are not using their own color-map ) are making the CDE run out of colors which would start sending this error to Xerror file thereby eating up all the disk space ( but this is 2GB !!! ) ?
3. As I asked before, does inability to write to /var directory lock the X display ( although we can still login to the machine etc )
4. Since the problem does not happen gradually, what can I do to reach to the root cause of the problem ?
5. Has someone seen anything like this before ?

Thanks