[KLUG Members] Increasing load, hang on shutdown

[Jamie McCarthy]

Hi all,

Do these symptoms sound familiar to anyone?

My home development Linux box had a problem last night.  I noticed
that my ssh terms were not responding very quickly, indeed at all.
It looked like new processes would refuse to start, i.e., I could
hit return and get a new bash prompt, but attempting to execute
any commands just hung.

So I went to the console and opened a few new shells and looked
around.  From the console all seemed well, except that load was
slowly increasing.  It was around 3 when I looked in, and ten
minutes later when I decided to shut down, it was around 9.
"top" reported no processes doing anything:  I was at 96 to 99%
idle all this time.

Seeing the increasing load, I started shutting things down;  a
daemon of my own, then apache, then MySQL, then sshd, and finally
quit out of X and stopped xdm and xfs.  Same symptoms:  load
slowly increasing, "top" showing nothing.

When I did the "/sbin/shutdown -h now", it started the normal
shutdown procedure, then got to this line:

    Saving the System Clock time to the Hardware Clock...

the next line should have appeared a moment later:

    Hardware Clock updated to [blah]

but after several hours that line never appeared.  It hung at that
point and I had to power-cycle it from the front panel.

If these symptoms ring a bell with anyone, please let me know.
I've had one other inexplicable problem with this box about a
month ago.  I'm wondering if it has bad RAM or a misinstalled
kernel or something.