[asterisk-users] Crash Hard, Crash Often

[Paul Chambers]

Josiah Bryan wrote:
> <snip>
> Problem is that its crashing for seemingly no reason at all, no errors 
> on the console, no logs (that I can find), nothing in /var/lib/messages 
> - its puzzeling! Management is screaming like banshees, calls are 
> dropping like flies, and all hell is about to break loose if I can't 
> stop asterisk from crashing every couple of hours, taking down any 
> Zaptel calls with it.
> </snip>

That description reminds me of a problem I ran into a while back. One 
fan had quietly failed, and the temperature would slowly creep up inside 
the box until things started 'acting funny' and the box would lock up 
soon after. It'd run fine for 3-4 hours, then just keel over and die. 
The logs didn't show anything consistent just before the event.

The failing fxo modules are also an interesting symptom. Perhaps your 
power supply is misbehaving? is the power supply in that machine of good 
quality?

I've never experienced it, but a friend has had two motherboards become 
unstable within a couple of months of each other, after running fine for 
3-4 years. When he examined the motherboards, both had capacitors around 
the CPU that had visibly 'ballooned' like a leaking alkaline battery 
would.  A long shot, but another example of previously stable hardware 
ceasing to be so.

Do you have another PC you can swap the drive and cards into, to try to 
rule out hardware instability? could you run lm_sensors? (along with one 
of the logging/alarm packages that support it).

-- Paul