How to diagnose spontaneous reboots?

[Neil Bird]

   Ordinarily, I'd say that this sort of thing is hardware related, and 
although I will be trying memtest for a while over the weekend, I'm 
suspicious that this has only started happening immediately after I upgraded 
from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10.

   I'm running 'nuvexport', which is a script that pulls in MythV recordings 
and spits out normalised video files;  in this case, an XVID AVI using (I 
think) ffmpeg.  Several minutes into the run, the PC just ups and reboots. 
This has now happened twice, and has never before.

   I will also be trying the run from init level 1 just to make sure nothing 
else running might be affecting it.


   But the question is:  if there *is* a bug (kernel?) that's letting a 
user-mode process reboot the machine, how to track it?

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit