Message-Id: <199509300451.VAA00295@corbin.Root.COM>
To: Ron Lenk <rlenk@widget.xmission.com>
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Mysterious reboot...any ideas? 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 29 Sep 95 18:14:53 MDT."
             <199509300014.SAA00425@widget.xmission.com> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 1995 21:51:34 -0700
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

>After doing a build of FreeBSD stable on Sept. 12th, my machine ran
>smoothly for 13 days, before it rebooted mysteriously this afternoon,
>while I was editing a message in emacs.
>
>At the bottom of the screen, I got a "Fatal error (1)" message, which
>I later discovered came from emacs. Several seconds later ( not more
>than 5 ) the familiar messages "...syslogd: exiting on signal 15",
>followed by "syncing disks..." and "Rebooting..." were printed on
>the console as if I had done a "reboot", or killed init.
>
>I was the only person logged in at the time, and I am the only one with
>root access here, so I'm certain that nobody rebooted the machine on
>purpose. It looks to me as if init just died.

   I've seen this once myself. It happend on wcarchive. It was weird -
basically, somehow init either got sent a SIGTERM or it got confused. The
result was that init killed everything off and went to single user mode.
To this day I don't understand how this happend, but it was quite shocking
when it occurred. All I did to restart things was type "umount -a; ^D",
and the system came back up. Weird.
   I spent some time looking at the init sources and didn't see a problem
there (but one could easily exist that I missed). My suspicion at the moment 
is that some system daemon has a bug (like an argument botch to kill(2))
that results in init getting sent a SIGTERM or other deadly signal. It might
be useful if the kernel logged something via syslog whenever it sends a signal
to init to indicate where the signal came from.

-DG