I have a server running Debian 12. It seems to hang up and freeze sometime between 12 hours and like 2-3 days. I really want to see what’s happening, but I can’t access my containers with the web UIs, can SSH, and adding a monitor shows the DE completely frozen. Rebooting fixes it for a while, but it locks up again after some time.
I had the same issue with 10 year old hardware so I threw together a “new” machine with some spare parts and it still happens I also tried rocky Linux and the same thing happened on both machines.
Any help and direction would be greatly appreciated!
Someone already linked to journalctl, but if you just quickly want to look, the command journalctl and the flag —since <your time here> will get you going.
Journalctls output can be piped, so if you know what you’re looking for you can grep it easily.
Yeah I really don’t know that I’m looking for unfortunately. I was something would jump out at me. I’m pretty new to Linux altogether so I’m kind of winging a lot
So go ahead and take a look at your journalctl output. The left hand side should be timestamps, so you can immediately figure out if it’s starting a million years in the past or sometime you know you had the problem.
If it is a million years in the past, use the —since flag and specify the time you want to start at as enumerated in the manual file (man journalctl).
Once you’re looking at the logs in journalctl from a day you know the problem happened, go ahead and use arrow keys and pgup/pgdn to find a reboot. You’ll know when you find a reboot because it’ll look different. The messages will be about figuring out what hardware is attached and changing runlevels and whatnot.
Once you found where the reboot is, go backwards to find something weird happening in the logs.
E: By default the parser (program used to handle text) of journalctls output is “less”. If you want to get out of it, press “q”, and if you want to know more “man less”.
