How do I report a non-package bug?????

Asked by tomdean

My 10.04 LTS suffered a spontaneous reboot last night at 23:43:13.

No indication in messages or syslog as to the cause.

How do I report this bug?

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Bilal Shahid (s9iper1) said :
#1

1)have you check the setting.
2)is this problem with empathy?
go to edit than preference and than check it..

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tomdean (tomdean) said :
#2

No.

The system was idle when it rebooted. Uptime is not 10 hours! It was up for a couple weeks before then. It was not a power problem, the system will not reboot after a power loss.

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mycae (mycae) said :
#3

Reporting a bug with no information is not particularly helpful. It will be impossible for anyone who might attempt to fix the problem to reproduce it. Remember bugs are not "something went wrong", but "this behaviour is wrong, and its something to do with/is caused by/is related to xyz"

The more information the better. Zero information beyond "it spontaneously rebooted" is not helpful. For all anyone knows it could be that your local power supply had a transient problem. This would be totally unfixable, and not reproduceable. Bugs need clues, unfortunately.

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tomdean (tomdean) said :
#4

The system will NOT reboot if there is a power supply problem. It stops for operator intervention or, requires pressing the boot button.

If the problem was caused by a package other than the kernel, there SHOULD be a message logged.

In this case, there is nothing in the logs.

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mycae (mycae) said :
#5

>The system will NOT reboot if there is a power supply problem. It stops for operator intervention or, requires >pressing the boot button.

how would it do this if you have no power from your electricity supplier? Do you have a UPS?

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tomdean (tomdean) said :
#6

On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 19:31 +0000, mycae wrote:
> Your question #163426 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/163426
>
> mycae posted a new comment:
> >The system will NOT reboot if there is a power supply problem. It stops
> for operator intervention or, requires >pressing the boot button.
>
> how would it do this if you have no power from your electricity
> supplier? Do you have a UPS?
>
If the AC power is off, the system stops and does nothing, as one would
expect.

This 'do nothing' stage lasts as long as there is no AC power.

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tomdean (tomdean) said :
#7

If the AC power is interrupted, the system stops. This 'do nothing' state lasts as long as AC power is not present.

This was not the case last night. No other system rebooted and no clocks needed resetting.

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mycae (mycae) said :
#8

This would be the case in a blackout, its true, but not in a spike, line-level drop, or other event.

The point I am making, is you need to provide information that actually lets us troubleshoot. "It hurts" doesn't provide us with information we can use to provide a diagnosis and remedy.

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tomdean (tomdean) said :
#9

On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 21:01 +0000, mycae wrote:
> Your question #163426 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/163426
>
> mycae posted a new comment:
> This would be the case in a blackout, its true, but not in a spike,
> line-level drop, or other event.
>
> The point I am making, is you need to provide information that actually
> lets us troubleshoot. "It hurts" doesn't provide us with information we
> can use to provide a diagnosis and remedy.
>
I understand that.

However, so far no one has any idea on how to acquire more information.

The previous up time was weeks. The only reboots have been for updates
and the last one was weeks ago. Last winter, there was a power outage.

My question was how to file a bug report when I cannot finger a specific
package. Maybe in response to that I can get some things to try in case
it happens again. Something that might trigger a log entry.

There are several systems on the same AC source, read main breaker.
Linux, FreeBSD, and, windows. None of those systems rebooted.

Spontaneous reboots are not acceptable.

tomdean

Revision history for this message
mycae (mycae) said :
#10

>My question was how to file a bug report when I cannot finger a specific
>package. Maybe in response to that I can get some things to try in case
>it happens again. Something that might trigger a log entry.

Unfortunately, you cant -- no-one can reproduce a problem that you can't. And reproducing something is the first step in a bug report, and any subsequent bug fix . I'd personally try mixing up the hardware, if you can. Maybe remove excess ram, expansion boards and drives if you don't need them (reduce module failure chance). Run memtest, fsck -- general diagnostics sort of things.

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Chris (fabricator4) said :
#11

The most likely cause for this is a power spike that upset something on the main board, causing a reset. This is a hardware dependent problem and not all computers will act the same way since there's too many variables involved: the power supply, the age of the power supply, The amount of filtering (if any) on the main board, the exact specifications of the main board and CPU, and even what else is plugged into the circuit and how it is plugged in.

I have seen problems where disconnecting the reset button solved this problem - the button and how it fitted into the fascia were faulty or poorly designed, resulting in random resets from time to time.

The only way to be even slightly confident it is not a power problem is to put a power conditioner or at least a good quality spike suppressor in the circuit. Even then there's no guarantee, since something else on the circuit could actually be causing the problem.

Bottom line is though, as most are suggesting power problems are the most likely cause of this reset, regardless of what has happened before and what other machines are on the same circuit but still operating fine. If the power supply is more than two years old, or is operating near its limits, it might also need to be upgraded.

Chris

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