Re: [Pan-users] Major Pan Trouble

[Alberto BARSELLA]

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 at 08:22:29PM +1100, Paul Trevethan wrote:

> I am trying to run Pan v0.14.2-0 under
> Suse9.0/XFce4 and I have a major major problem. Every time I exit the
> program (which works fine while I am in it) it REBOOTS my machine with a
> warm boot!!

Since I assume you're not running pan as root, this is symptom of a
kernel problem.  If I remember correctly, one approach used in the linux
kernel is: if something fails and there's no way to recover reasonably,
just reboot the machine.  I've seen this happen when accessing a NTFS
partition in read-only mode: there was one file which would trigger a
reboot when accessed.  A simple check is to try a different kernel
version (and I mean from 2.4 to 2.6 or vice-versa, minor revisions
may not fix the issue).
The suggestion about logging debug information is good, but it may be
that it fails to get anything reasonable written to the disk before
the system reboots.  I don't know if forcing synchronous updates of the
root partition can help.  Does Suse use a vanilla kernel or it's a patched
one?
Also, check on the kernel mailing lists if anything similar is mentioned,
or try asking there: a userspace program rebooting the machine is the
kind of trouble you don't want to have :)

Bye,
Alberto
--
Alberto BARSELLA
** Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning.
A non-functioning mind is clinically dead.  Believe in nothing... **