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hey guys,
I have my FreeBSD box as some of you may know. This morning I go to login via SSH and just get a black screen. When I go the console I get a login prompt but the system is completely frozen. I have rebooted the system multiple times and when the login prompt comes up the system freezes. I can ping the box and it will respond. The box is an older one so I'm afraid something may have gone on it as this started suddenly. Any suggestions? TIA
The box is a sole unix system so no boot loader is used
guys an update,
I can boot into single user mode and use that. I noticed the system is show starting sshd. as soon as the login prompt comes up the system will freeze. I can usually type in one character at the login prompt before the system locks up tight.
Check to see if your CPU fan is alright. After our conversation in IRC, i think it might be a hardware problem. You say that in runlevel 1 it doesnt freeze. But in other runlevels it does. Also check all the other hardware, such as ram. And also try taking the sshd out of the boot process. Try all combinations.
Good luck.
Update, round 2
I went into single user mode and set sshd_enbable to no in /etc/rc.conf. I was then able to go into runlevel 3 without it freezing up. I then started sshd, reset sshd_enable in rc.conf to yes and rebooted. The system hasn't frozen yet.
for those of you that wish to know the CPU and PSU fans are running
Was there anything on the boxes logs (akin to syslog.log?) I am not sure of the version or utilities, but is there a type of hardware or support tools manager that would report on firmware and hardware modules? Sometimes these problems have a way of coming and going leading to hard crash.
Just a thought.
I dealt with this same issue a few different times. Turns out I had goofed a few different settings.
My first mistake was in /etc/hosts - I some how managed to lose entries for the local machine but kept all the entries for the external machines (this includes a typo in the local machine entries).
Second mistake - I reallocated the port of sshd in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and it was a port that directly conflicted with another daemon. The other Daemon took precedence and forced the failure of the sshd
Third mistake - I manually modified /var/log/auth.log and the sshd couldn't, or wouldn't, add to it any more.
More often than not, if you use 'dmesg | more' from a terminal, it should give you the error the daemon was having. Granted it's working now, but if you can find the specifics on the error, you can likely take measures to prevent it from happening again.
Regards,
Chefer
[EDIT] I have no reason to believe that it is hardware related. [/EDIT]
Problem went away as fast as it came....Thanks All :D