Hi people,
I have a serious problem that's got me tearing my hair out. My webserver appears to be turning itself of periodically and not at any specific times. Just whenever it feels like it. I'm running RH 8.0 on an athlon/nvidia box. Here are some of the weirder points: It started happening all of the sudden about three days ago. It had been running for a couple of weeks prior to this problem. Since I don't have easy access to the server, when this happens I call the place where the server lives and they restart. It wasn't until yesterday that I actually went there myself that I figured out that it had actually powered down completely. Until that time, I thought it was just locked up. So when I tried to turn it back on, it wouldn't turn on. I ended up checking the powercord and when I moved it to another outlet, I was able to turn it on. So I thought, OK, the problem must be with the power outlet and went home, confident that I'd finally solved the problem and everything would be fine forever after. Wake up this morning, try to ssh to my server... dead. Anyone have any answers to this one? Could it be some sort of hardware problem?

Pall

Maybe if the server doesn't get any requests for a while they computer will go to sleep...
(power way down). I ca'nt think of anything else. Cept falty hardware.

Well, my parents had this problem before, this is a tiny bit of a funny story, so let me start from the begining:

About September last year, the fan on their processor got really load to the point where it was really annoying, so I took off the case, checked the fan to clear any dust buildup in there, and put it back on and started it back up, however, the noise continued. So i left it thinking that it would be fine and they will have to deal with it. A few months later I noticed their computer quieted down a bit so I figured the fan went back to normally. A few months later, without remembering any of what happened before, their computer started shutting down all the time for no reason. Sometimes a blue screen would flash, and sometimes it would be sitting idle and just crash. So, my first though was that there may be some faulty ram, so I used the ram check program included wtih SuSE and did a scan, everything was fine on that end. So, I left it, blaming the fact that they bought a Cyrix processor and it's probably reaching it's life's end. Last night, I took their computer apart again to replace their video card with my old voodoo card, and to check what motherboard they had in there. When finishing that, like I do whenever I fix a computer, i powered the system back up with the cover still off to make sure everything is okay. However, the processor fan wasn't spinning at all. It was only then that I put two and two together and realized that the time when the computer got quiet was the same time that it started shutting down spontaneously. So, the processor was constantly over-heating and shutting itself down. i felt really stupid for nothing thinking about it earlier, however, it wasn't my computer so I wasn't worried.

So, I would suggest going to the server, doing a few test runs on it, check everything inside and out, make sure the fans are working fine. If it has temperature sensors, check it and make sure it's running at a good temp. Make sure that the processor is not over-clocked (hey, they're getting cheaper, just buy a faster one if you want speed, don't over-clock), and pick up a program that tests ram to make sure that it's fine.

...and if anyone has a spare processor fan, let me know