Hello,

Several times per week my iMac G4 (running the latest version of Tiger) will not respond to the mouse or keyboard after the screensaver actives. I can't SSH into the box, existing sessions are terminated. I can ping it however.

There are no details in the log files in /var/log that I can see which point to the issue, but then again this is not my area of expertise.

All I have been able to do is to turn the power off and back on again.

Does anyone have any tips as to log levels, debugging information etc that I can use to try and pinpoint the problem?

Thanks!

Cheers,
David

Anything in particular happening that might be linked to this? Are you running any programs when this happens? Or does this happen while you are using SSH from another machine?

possibly an issue with spotlight journalling?

i have solved a couple of similar issues by disabling spotlight journalling in system preferences... it can cause certain degrees of perceived 'hanging' in some instances, especially when waking from sleep

just a thought

p.

Silver,

Nothing that I can ascertain. I have closed down all Dock applications (& on other occasions left some running). I certainly haven't been SSH'd into the machine every time it has hung - in general that would be the exception. I run Apache2, but it doesn't start automatically and the machine has hung while this is not running. I have a couple of Menubar utilities - Menu Meters, Sailing Clicker mainly.

Peajay,

I'll try disabling Spotlight journalling - although this is definitely not a perceived hang - it goes away and doesn't come back

Cheers,
David

I had a weird problem with a machine doing exactly what you described - it would lock up hard for no discernible reason and at no particular time, requiring a hard reset.

So far, I've experimentally done the following to see if it fixes the problem:

Installed the 10.4.6 COMBO update. This, strangely, stopped a bunch of weird errors appearing in the system log.

Run Tiger cache cleaner in deep-clean mode.

David,

Is this a stand-alone machine or is it bound to a directory service (like Windows Active Directory for example.) It's a long shot but I've seen something very similar before.

Nard,

it is a standalone machine.

Cheers,
David

All,

Thanks for your help - in the end it turned out to be an external firewire drive that had died and was bringing the Mac down with it. Removed the drive and the problem went away.

Cheers,
david