xserve spontaneously restarts

[apr400]

Update:

I did have the problem tracked to copy lots of data to an external firewire drive. Every time I did this the machine fell over an hour and a half later and required a PMU reset to get out of the restart every five minutes cycle.

However, it has for the moment stopped doing this. I have been having some chats with various Applecare people, who thought initially that it might be a bad logic board (bad nvram possibly, as indicated by the fact that auto-restart settings weren’t being followed {ie it did when it was set not to}. Now it seems more likely that there was some sort of loose connection and that open the case may have reseated something. The machine has now been up for 10 days without a problem, albeit under fairly light load.

For anyone that wants it I have a script I wrote that maintains a rolling log of a selectable number of processes using top. You can specify how much history to retain, how often to sample, how to sort the processes (CPU, memory etc). It proved quite helpful in convincing me that I didn’t have a runaway process, and might help also if you do, especially if you’re not seeing anything unusual in the logs. Email me via my profile if you want it.

Anyway for the moment everything is working and I am going to give the machine a bit of stress testing before I try to deploy again.