Sorry for the hugely late summary on this one.
Thanks to Stephen Boyd Gowing <sbg@fox-in.socs.uts.EDU.AU> for mailing me now
and reminding me to summarize.
While I did receive a couple of pieces of email on this, no-one provided any
information that helped solve the problem.
But I did solve it: with some trial and error testing with the user
involved, we figured out that it was dclock (the old freeware X digital
clock program) that was causing it! Once he stopped running dclock, the
problem stopped occuring.
I have not had any time to investigate it any further than that - I was
simply glad that the problem went away.
Davin.
Original question:
>Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 21:08:18 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Davin Milun <milun@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
>To: sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu
>Subject: Crashing X server
>
>I have a weird problem, which I can't find the cause of.
>
>I have a user (just one, of all the users that we support, many of who have
>identically configured systems), for who X crashes.
>
>The system is a SPARCstation 4/110, running Solaris 2.6 (105181-06)
>running OpenWindows 3.6 (105633-08), and not running CDE (even though it is
>installed on the system). (Full showrev -p is attached.)
>
>The user reported that the error occurred at random, but closer investigation
>showed that it occurs either at 1am or 1pm exactly! And the crash is Xsun
>crashing with a segfault.
>
>My first thought was that some cron job was causing it, but there are no 1am
>or 1pm crontab entries on that system (nor on the server system that is its
>NIS server and home-directory NFS server).
>
>I copied that user's .cshrc, .login, .xinitrc, .Xdefaults into my account
>there, and now it happens to me on his system. (I have not verified if it
>happens if I leave my own setup, rather than his.)
>
>Note that it does not happen at EVERY 1am/pm, but only at some (random?) of
>them.
>
>When running as me, I left a root truss running on the Xsun process.
>And, at exactly 1am, it died with the following:
>
>3883: Incurred fault #6, FLTBOUNDS %pc = 0xEEEDEB2C
>3883: siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xEE5A9000
>3883: Received signal #11, SIGSEGV [default]
>3883: siginfo: SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR addr=0xEE5A9000
>3883: *** process killed ***
>
>I have eliminated hardware as the problem, by switching his system for
>another identically configured SS4. And the problem did not go away.
>
>
>One of the X clients that running with his standard setup is Netscape (4.05),
>but he says that thinks that it has crashed on him when he was not running
>Netscape.
>
>
>Does anyone have any clues/advice on this, as the user is becoming quite
>irrated at X crashing out from under him, and I have no real guesses as to
>what could be causing the X server to crash.
--
Davin Milun E-mail: milun@cse.Buffalo.EDU milun@acm.org
Fax: (716) 645-3464
WWW: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~milun/
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