have you ever crashed linux/unix?

[questionasker]

have you ever crashed or froze linux/unix?

only times(3) i ever have is when running mandrake 9.0, and attempted to use the hardware list command.

[sharth]

directfb is a great and easy way to crash the console.

[je_fro]

I crash all the time, but then again, I run bleeding edge software on new, fancy hardware. Always a bad combo...
My *BSD boxes and Debian box have been up for months at a time without crashing. I just shut them down for one reason or another.... kernel recompile, new os, boredom...etc.....

[bwkaz]

Forkbombs:

:() {:|:;:&};: will crash you out nicely if you're using bash. Eventually. (It has to eat up all your PIDs first, but once they're gone, you can't do anything but reboot, because you can't start a process to get anything done.)

I've only done this once, and I DON'T recommend trying it out. ;)

I've also had issues with flaky hardware (like when my video card fan was going bad, X would freeze up on me).

[sclebo05]

when i was in college my roommate crashed a the school's Sun OS 5.8 box by writing an app that continuously forked off processes and did random calculations at the same time. Needless to say, i couldnt check my school email for days :rolleyes:

[Satanic Atheist]

My machine locks up all the time, but I'm using OLD hardware coupled with a power-spike that hit it before failing altogether. I've already gone through one PSU in 4 years...

Hey, I like life on the edge. You just don't wanna know what's gonna happen next.

Read the "Destructive Fun with Linux" a little further down. You might find something you like. It's a recent thread.

James

[Thrasher]

I'm still trying to figure out how NOT to crash Linux/Unix...
By the time I am able to go one day without crashing it, I will be an expert!!!

(Murphy's law strikes again)

[psi42]

I remember xcdroast locked up my system hard. I have no idea what it was doing. The cd read light was on, but nothing was happening. After an hour I had to hard reboot. :(

Also, the slack 9 install cd keeps OOPS-ing on one of my systems (unfortunately my only decent system). I'm going to have to figure that out someday. :( Actually, probably better just to wait for slack 9.1 :)

[sasKuatch]

Hhhhmmmm..... One time Uplink locked it up for me. That's about all i can remember in four years.

[Okie]

when i was more of a newbie at linux i would crash it more often, now i rarely ever crash...


once i was away from my computer whilte it was booted to linux, my brother who does not know anything about linux could not figure out how to properly reboot, so he presses the reset button on the box and totally trashes three distros i have installed (none of them would boot after that) and i had to reinstall, now i don't keep three distros installed as i barely have time for one (JAMD)...

http://www.jamd-linux.com/index.php

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by sclebo05
when i was in college my roommate crashed a the school's Sun OS 5.8 box by writing an app that continuously forked off processes and did random calculations at the same time. Something like:

int main()
while(1) fork(); perhaps? Of course, if it did random calculations then it would be more than just this...

[sclebo05]

yeah something like that. he asked me a 'theoretical question' about infinite loops, and i answered it. the next thing i knew he had a half baked C program that killed the machine. i never helped him again. :cool:

[CaptainPinko]

i'm no h4X0rZ but wouldn't it sensible for the os to check the number of pids before it assigns one to a user? and have a cap per user based on group and always keep a few extras pids for "just in case" ie. so that root could ssh in and kill some stuff? i'm no genkus here but it seems rather obvious... but then again protected memory seems obvious andhow long did we (well more like some of you) live w/o it?

[Moak]

Originally posted by questionasker
have you ever crashed or froze linux/unix?
The first time I installed Gentoo I had problems getting Direct Rendering working. After getting it working, I added a few opions to my XF86Config file to crank out as many fps as possible. I went too far and was able to freeze X (couldn't even CtrlAltBackspace out)... since then I have gotten everything working fine :)

Moak

[carbon-12]

For some weird reason everytime i burn a CD with k3b my system freezes(MDK9.1). Its been like this for a couple of weeks so im using cdrecord in the CLI now. No problems so far.

[kly546]

The first crash I had was in redhat 8. My Plextor 12/10/32a was working great and then one day it completely froze the system when I was writing a cd in gnome toaster. From that point on it kept on either freezing the system or writing CDs which just turned out to be blank. Anyway, I installed a new cd-rw and everything was fine. So actually that was most likely the hardware to blame instead of the software.
The only other system freezes I've had in redhat 8 are very rare lock ups with nvidia drivers, but those were only with the first sets of linux drivers nvidia released for download.

I've had debian woody for about a year and haven't locked it up yet. I've only had some crashes in the gnome 1.4 control panel, which the gnome team never bothered to fix. Anyway, all i use now is ice window manager by itself, and it's awesome.

[leonpmu]

who is intrested in technology but doesnt know squat (dangerous kind), anyway I was copy ing some data from my tower to my laptop which had an external harddisk attached and I was FTPing the data to the external drive for backup.

Anyway everything was going well and this bloody monkey walks into my room/office (@ home) picks up the drive, while it is still reading and writing, and says wow that nice, and starts turning the fscking thing around, I was in such a state of shock I couldnt do anything, except stare in disbelief praying that nothing would go wrong.... I was wrong. He puts it down, and.... nothing. All three devices had stopped dead in their tracks, the external drive, my laptop, and my tower. No keyboard, no mouse, NOTHING...

SO I had no option but to hard power cycle my laptop, to find that X was now broken. 20 Minutes later, it was fixed, I am still finding problems related to that stuff up. He broke Perl, completely, Frozen-bubble no longer works, Gnucash refuses to start, and I just dont have the time to backup everything and start from scratch!!!!! AAARRRRGGHH!!!

I like it when people are interested in computers, but when people touch things they know nothing about, I get really cross!!!

Just my waste of time and forum space
:D

[dysharmonic]

Just wondering what does 'half baked' C program mean? Sorry, not a programmer here...:o

[mrBen]

Well, I think everyone manages it, but I think that is the key - we 'manage' rather than 'expect' Linux to crash/hang.

I've had the odd bit of software go funny, but not usually the whole system. Even the other day with funny USB problems, it wasn't a hard reset, but just a need to reboot. (Probably because I didn't know how to solve the problem, rather than the problem needing a reboot)

Most full crashes are hardware related, in my experience, apart from the odd driver-related issue.

(Mind you, my friend Al is beginning to lose faith after failed installs of Mandrake 9.0, 9.1, Knoppix 3.1 and Debian 3.0 - although I think he has got an as-yet-undefined hardware problem)

[hlrguy]

X occasionally locks on me. Before I had flash installed correctly, Mozilla would sometimes freeze X. But CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE fixes that, so I don't consider it an OS failure. One time, xcdroast locked my CD, and had to reboot to get it back, but that was a partial failure. I honestly can't remember ever having to do a hard reboot with Redhat 8.0, and maybe 2-3 times with Redhat 7.0. I did really try to crash the system once, just to see what it would do. I have ~2000 oggs on my system. I created a script that opened an xterm, did an oggdec and then converted to MP3. (I use this to convert to MP3 for my DVD player).

I figured, what the heck, lets see what happens. Using Konqueror, I select all oggs, then selected open with my script, run in console. After the OK, well, the system tried, successfully I might add, coming back 7 hours later, to open 2000 terms, and convert 2000 oggs in parallel. Took about 30 minutes for the 'Lock Screen' button to get the CPU time to actually do it, but it blew me away. It normally takes about 10 seconds for oggdec-->MP3 complete, so running so many in parallel added about 20% to the complete execution time, but it did it. :D

hlrguy

256 Meg ram, 2.4 GHz processor. Maybe a lessor horsepowered machine would have failed...don't know.

[sclebo05]

it was sloppy, unreadable, and kinda worked :)

[SeT]

I see Unix/Linux crashed here at least once a week. In a company this size it's bound to happen some time. There's somewhere around 200-250 HP Unix workstations - each one has multiple users logged in constantly using them for high end CAD programs (Unigraphics mainly.) One is bound to not wanna work sooner or later...

[sasKuatch]

mrBen, you bring up a good point. I've rebooted for reasons as trivial as loading many unnecessary modules with modprobe and not wanting to clean up afterwards.

Real, hard lockups are rare (even with windows, IMO)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by CaptainPinko
i'm no h4X0rZ but wouldn't it sensible for the os to check the number of pids before it assigns one to a user? man bash

Hit the '/' key, and type in ulimit. Hit enter.

The 'ulimit' bash builtin does exactly what you're saying, but it's a per-user limit. And most distros don't turn it on, in my experience.

It is a great way to stop forkbombs, though. :)

Originally posted by sasKuatch
Real, hard lockups are rare (even with windows, IMO). Rare, maybe. But I just had one a couple days ago. Apparently the OS (or video driver?) decided it'd be a good idea to hard-lock as I was resizing an MDI child window. :confused: This was 2K Pro, too, which made even less sense. Nothing in the event log, no BSOD, just a hard-locked machine.

Of course, this is one event, too. Kinda anecdotal... :p

[ikellen]

Only time I locked linux was when I accidentily knocked some USB device out, as they system was communicating with it, and it wouldn't stop trying to talk to that USB thing. I switched to one of the virtual consoles and rebooted it that way. Not sure if this counts, but I have crashed the purty, aqua filled OS know as Mac OS X. Man when that thing crashes, aqua turns into kernel panic messages cutting through the GUI laying on top. One time I crashed it right as a Mac diehard at my work walked by............he couldn't believe it. The best part - I'm pretty sure I crashed it that time running Microsoft Word in Office X. Man M$ + Apple !== good :)

[Satanic Atheist]

I can't remember my machine locking up altogether, but incredibly, I was forced to do a hard reboot last night.

Thanks to Linux, I was able to recover 30Gbs of Data off a knackered Fujitsu hard drive. But, whilst I was copying off the data, my mouse locked up solid in X. When the copying finished, I attempted to restart GDM but it killed X and restarted it. OK, I had the mouse back.

Shortly after, I was copying again and then my keyboard lights started flickering, in unison, constantly and I couldn't type. Then my mouse locked up again. Now, X is still running (the clock is still going) and everything is fine. There's nothing wrong with the keyboard or mouse, and without messing around connecting up another machine to reboot, I just hit the 'ole reset button.

I've had this trouble in the past, but I really don't know what it is. Just before it locks solid, the mouse jumps wildly all over the screen and "assumes" that buttons have been pressed (it'll jump to the bottom left corner and hide the panel, for example).

Wonder if the PS/2 controllers on the MoBo are knackered? My machine did suffer a power surge many moons ago...

James

[sasKuatch]

Hey! I've had that happen before (the mouse flying wildly about on the screen part). I was using Debian and didn't configure X correctly yet.

[Satanic Atheist]

Seriously?

Did it happen on occasion? I.e. mostly normal then suddenly go crazy and you'd have to restart X to get it back? At least, that's what I do.

Not sure about the misconfigured X, how did you sort it?

James

[cjanscen]

I managed to crash yesterday, I did:

cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc ~/image.iso

...and there was no CD-R in the drive, just hung and I had to reset. Then again I am using beta software, kernel 2.6.0-test5 and the latest alpha of cdrecord

[biscaynesix]

I cut off the power in the middle of a fsck session, crashed it. I tried running badblocks and superblocks or whatever and it didnt work, I ended up formatting and reinstalling.

[jlpktnst]

I've got some hard crashes becouse of ati's graphic driver (which is now fixed mostly) -> when I tried to kill the thing it hardlocked :) - and NO data lost on current system even though I had many hardlocks.
I lost system twice on my older linux rig due the ati graphic driver (rage128).
and some crashes becouse of my unbaked programs - lol
(last thing was just some days before when it turned off my monitor and I had to reboot to get it back).

I will not talk about windows crashes...

[sasKuatch]

Originally posted by Satanic Atheist
Seriously?

Did it happen on occasion? I.e. mostly normal then suddenly go crazy and you'd have to restart X to get it back? At least, that's what I do.

Not sure about the misconfigured X, how did you sort it?

James

It didn't required me to restart X, and it worked fine most of the time. I fixed it by switching back to Mandrake and having it configured for me.

[SDS]

When I used Mandrake, Control center itself always locked up, but I could always just kill that window and move on, which is reallly no big deal because you can just edit that stuff in the terminal and config files anyways. Now, Slack has never totally crashed on me to my knowledge. I've had X Window crash on me a few times where I had to cntrl+alt+backspace out of there, but that was because I'd installed the flash plugin incorrectly, and it would crash the window manager.