RH8 blank screen

[Jun Zhang_4]

Don't know when it will happen, but it's happened quite a few times now.
I have to telnet in and reboot, then everything is fine. This box serves as a firewall and proxy. During its blank screen period, all the clients can reach the internet through it without a problem.

Jun

[Fred Ruffet]

What do you call blank screen ? Can't you still switch between sessions whith ALT+1, ALT+2... ?

If you can still connect through telnet, could you see what process are down ? And couls you provide logs from syslog and firewall/proxy programs ?

[Steven E. Protter]

on another computer.

telnet or ssh to the Linux box.

su - root


tail -f /var/log/messages

Or do the tail command on the console.

Whats the last thing you see when it goes dark?

Also, make sure bios hardware sleep configuration is turned off. Your hardware might be going to sleep and Linux isn't configured or able to handle it on your hardware.

SEP

[Jun Zhang_4]

I meant that you always see a screen with nothing on it, and moving the mouse and touch a key has no effect.
I would also think that apmd may have something to do with the problem. After take it off with chkconfig and reboot, there still is a process
root 3 1 0 08:19 ? 00:00:00 [kapmd]
which is not killable (even with -9).
//apmd related logs in /var/log/messages//
Apr 21 20:07:21 microxp apmd[668]: Exiting
Apr 21 20:07:22 microxp apmd: apmd shutdown succeeded
Apr 21 20:10:36 microxp apmd[652]: Version 3.0.2 (APM BIOS 1.2, Linux driver 1.16)
Apr 21 20:10:36 microxp apmd: apmd startup succeeded
Apr 21 20:10:37 microxp apmd[652]: Charge: * * * (-1% unknown)
Apr 22 08:13:40 microxp apmd[652]: Exiting
Apr 22 08:18:14 microxp apmd: apmd shutdown failed


Jun

[Roberto Polli]

1) To check if a machine is freezed you shoud simply press and verify thad leds works. If so your machine is able to read from kbd so it's no freezed
2) being your workstations able to reach internet the machine is sureli pingable (if no firewall.icmp rules are set) so it wasn't freezed
3) kapmd id a kernel procs regarding power management.
Peace,, R

[Fred Ruffet]

Apparently, your running X on your firewall/proxy (!) : Are you able to switch to text mode (i.e ctrl+alt+F1) ?

What are you using as firewall and proxy ?

[John Collier]

Jun,

If all you are wanting is a router/firewall/proxy, then I might suggest that you look into a little distro called Smoothwall ( http://www.smoothwall.org ).

This is the package I have personally been running at home for many months now and I can't find anything about it that I don't like.

The only reason for mentioning it is that it is a dedicated security device and, therefore, they have stripped all of the extra security holes out of it by design. There is little to nothing to maintaining it. You simply install it on any low-end Pentium class machine with two or three network cards (depending on your needs), do your initial configurations through the keyboard and screen and then promptly disconnect everything from it short of the power and network cables. It is designed and expected to be used 'headless' by administering it either through SSH or a rather snazzy web interface (your choice).

While any distro of Linux will theoretically work for a router/firewall/proxy, unless you know all of the packages to strip yourself during install you are likely to have a hole or two available that you don't need. This helps to eliminate that to a large degree.


Just a suggestion,
John

PS. To give you an idea of what I mean by low-end Pentium, mine runs on a Pentium 133 with 64 MG of RAM and is greatly overpowered for my environment even running Squid for all connections.

[Jun Zhang_4]

Thanks to all your replies.
Since this problem hapens in a mystereous fashion (you don't know when and there is not any meaningfull log message related), and I've disabled the apmd. All I can do is to wait.
My netscape 7.1 on RH wouldn't let me assign points for now. Instead of a pull down menu, "unassigned" is hardcoded, unclickable. Soon I'll be able to get on to other platforms to assign points.

Jun