Server spontaneously rebooting under RHEL-4

[james.oden at gmail.com (James Olin Oden)]

On 3/28/06, BRUCE STANLEY <bruce.stanley@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
> There could even be a simpler reason for this problem.
> We had a server do this very thing under  REHL-3  and it
> turned out to be hardware related.
>
> The servive technicians came in and reset the the memory, CPU,
> replaced the CPU fan, and reset the bios.
>
One thing that I have seen occur more often with 2.6 kernels is
catching of MCE's (Machine Check Exceptions).  The MCE's are the
processors way of saying something is extremely wrong that it can
detect.   This typically will cause a panic though not causing a
reboot.  OTH, If your hardware also has support for a watchdog then
shortly after the panic a reboot would occur.

I'm not saying that this is what is actually happening, but just that
along the lines of what has been said thus far, this would make sense.
 If indeed this is the case, maybe the panic output is in
/var/log/messages.

Cheers...james
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