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Ubuntu has been freezing randomly for some time now. Usually after a freeze, the crash screen would be up and it would show the exec path as update-notifer.

Today after 9 hours of uptime it froze with no crash report. I disabled auto updates before this last freeze.

We use it on a server that hosts CrushFTP. At the very lease could someone help point me to the correct log that could potentially show the cause of this?

I'm still very new to Ubuntu so apologies for my ignorance here.

If anyone has the time to help me comb through a log to help me understand what I'm looking at that would be great too :)

N0rbert
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Matt
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  • In my experience, if it freezes suddenly there might be no log report so I can't answer your question as asked. I have found that the only actual freezes with 16.04 have been caused by external factors such as an overheating CPU. Have you checked your cooling system to make sure it is keeping the system happy? – SDsolar May 03 '18 at 16:27
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    I have since installed psensor and everything looks good. We have cron/crons set up, is it possible these crons running every hour could cause a freeze? Looking at the syslog.1, I see at 00:17:01 a CRON ran, and at 12:48:19 the server froze. – Matt May 09 '18 at 09:59
  • How do you know the time the server froze? If there is additional information like this it should be included in the question for others to see. If it logged the run of a cron job afterwards then perhaps it is just the user interface that is freezing, and not the CPU or kernel. So it is not a hardware problem. Any time that happens, always try Alt-F2 - in character mode that gives you a second virtual tty, and in the GUI it can unfreeze it sometimes. – SDsolar May 09 '18 at 18:31
  • Is this a 32 or 64 bit OS? Are you running the Chromium browser? Freezing problems on 16.04 went away with a 64 bit install of 18.04 on a friend's computer. – ubfan1 May 09 '18 at 19:08
  • https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxLogFiles – SDsolar May 09 '18 at 19:14
  • I know the time the server froze because of the time on the frozen server. I compared that to any logs that were updated same day and it matched the time there as well. I can see in the log the last time information stopped collecting. We use it as an FTP server so if only the GUI froze wouldn't the FTP service still be operational?

    This is a 64 bit OS. We are not running the Chromium browser. I'll look into installing 18.04 to see if that helps. The freeze is more recent, more in the past couple months.

     – Matt May 11 '18 at 14:22

1 Answers1

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How to monitor your cron log in real time:

16.04: How do I make cron create cron.log and monitor it in real time?

Excerpt:

--> Make a change in /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf with your favorite editor:

sudo gedit /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf

Use Ctrl-f (find) and type cron to find the line that says 

#cron.*         /var/log/cron.log

Remove the # from that line. Then restart the service:

service rsyslog restart

From then on, all cron-related output will go to /var/log/cron.log

In order to prevent cron from sending summary emails, place this line at the beginning of your crontab file:

crontab -e
(Insert first line)
MAILTO=""

Then to watch it in near-real-time, first create a wcron command:

echo "#!/bin/bash" >wcron
echo "watch -n 10 tail -n 25 /var/log/cron.log" >>wcron
chmod +x wcron
sudo cp wcron /usr/sbin
  • watch -n 10 tells it to refresh the page every 10 seconds
  • tail -n 25 tells it to display the last 25 entries

Whenever you want to monitor cron in near-real-time in a terminal window, enter:

wcron

------------------------------------------------------------

Same can be done to monitor syslog, by creating the slog command

echo "#!/bin/bash" >slog
echo "watch -n 2 tail -n 25 /var/log/syslog" >>slog
chmod +x slog
sudo cp slog /usr/sbin

Whenever you want to monitor /var/log/syslog in near-real-time in a terminal window, enter:

slog

Note: If you need to pause this output temporarily:

  • Ctrl-S for Pause

  • Ctrl-Q for Resume

SDsolar
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