[rhn-users] Sudden system restarts

[Brian T. Brunner]

Running: a large application in a small (64MB) system.
Symptom: sudden system restarts (as if by watchdog hardware reset)
Method to trigger: when the system runs well, open (another) ssh shell and execute "makewhatis".
I did this with other shells running top, and vmstat 1, this was the last thing printed on those shells:

  2:47pm  up 31 min,  5 users,  load average: 1.36, 1.37, 1.00
79 processes: 78 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  9.7% user, 25.6% system,  0.0% nice, 64.5% idle
Mem:    57608K av,   52724K used,    4884K free,       0K shrd,    6040K buff
Swap:  240964K av,       0K used,  240964K free                   31444K cached

   procs                      memory    swap          io     system         cpu
 r   b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs    us   sy   id
11  0  0      0   4880   6040  31444   0   0     0     0  581  1068    5  17  78
 8   0  0      0   4880   6040  31444   0   0     0     0  620  1084    7  16  77
 7   0  0      0   4880   6040  31444   0   0     0     0  644  1103    7  19  75
10  0  0      0   4888   6040  31444   0   0     0     0  630  1068  17  54  28

The hardware watchdog is shut off.
There is no evidence in /var/log/messages nor /var/log/dmesg.  I don't know where else to look.
Swap is unused and plentiful.

Wanted: clues about utilities to run, switches to set on, etc. when causing this catastrophic reset.

Brian Brunner
brian.t.brunner at gai-tronics.com
(610)796-5838

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