Re: system goes unresponsive

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20121217180418.11B621E4A2%body.prd.co.uk@localhost>,
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
>Thanks for the response, Christos.
>
>If I exit from top, I can't do anything that I've tried so far, which
>has not included 'netstat -m'.   It's not just the network that's
>broken, I can't do anything directly on the console.   It's as if I
>can't start a new process (and incoming requests, for rsync for
>instance, or incoming emails, fail).

If your kernel has ddb compiled into it, you could ctrl-alt-escape to
enter it. Next time before starting top on the console try 'stty status ^T'
and when you exit top you could hit ^T (when the system appears hanging).
It might give you more information.

Another useful thing to do is to mount something over nfs and then log
'vmstat 1' and 'netstat 1' output to remote files, to see if anything
interesting is happening before the machine becomes unresponsive.

christos