Re: Diagnosing cause of reboots

[Luke Maurits <luke%maurits.id.au@localhost>]

> Do 'shutdown -r' sometime and look at the logs.   I think reboot is
> listed on startup, and shutdown separately.

It looks like you're right.  A manual reboot from the command line
looks like this:

reboot    ~                         Sun Jul 22 21:30
shutdown  ~                         Sun Jul 22 21:28
luke      pts/0    <ip address>     Sun Jul 22 21:26 - shutdown  (00:01)

So there's a line for my login being terminated by shutdown, then one
for the shutdown itself and one more a little later for coming back
up.  So I guess the single lines I'm seeing for the unexplained reboots
actually are consistent with a panic or hardware fault, and not a
program calling reboot like I thought.

> I'd suggest setting ddb.onpanic=2 and looking at the serial console
> through the provider's interface.

Thanks, I've gone ahead and set that sysctl value.  Now, in full
accordance with Murphy's law, the problem will mysteriously disappear
and I'll never get to see any traceback. :)

While setting that I noticed that kern.dump_on_panic=1 seems to be set
by default.  Does this mean if my previous reboots were due to panics I
should have core files lying around somewhere?  I've checked /var/crash
but all that's there is a file named "minfree" which contains nothing
but the string "1024" and has a timestamp that's older than my acutal
install.

Thanks,
Luke