How to tell why a computer rebooted

B-Con · 2009-11-19 18:43:04

Twice now I've had my desktop reboot for seemingly no reason, and I'd like to know why. It happened yesterday and today. Both times I was not with it nor had I iterated with it in hours.

The first time it rebooted it failed to mount my root partition, claiming it was an invalid filesystem (or something). I just hit Ctrl-D to reboot and it rebooted, did an fsck, and everything was fine. This last time I went to the computer in the late morning and there was simply a login prompt awaiting; uptime showed that it happened at about 6:30 AM. We haven't had any power outages and there are no other users for the computer.

Is there a way to see at what time the computer is rebooted and, say, what process issued the command? I want to see if it's actually being rebooted or if it's randomly crashing. My nearly identical laptop install hasn't experienced any instability recently, though.

MadTux · 2009-11-19 18:49:24

Maybe you should look into

/var/log/messages.log
/var/log/daemon.log
/var/log/kernel.log

/var/log/Xorg.0.log will be overridden, afaik.

Last edited by MadTux (2009-11-19 18:50:04)

brisbin33 · 2009-11-19 19:04:05

use uptime to calculate the time of the reboot, then grep through /var/log/everything.log for just before the 'event'. that's my best guess.

B-Con · 2009-12-29 17:56:10

Thanks for the replies.

For others with related questions, the "last" command shows recent logins and logoffs.

Anyway, never figured out what the problem was, and I haven't had any problems for the last month and a half.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-19 18:43:04

How to tell why a computer rebooted

#2 2009-11-19 18:49:24

Re: How to tell why a computer rebooted

#3 2009-11-19 19:04:05

Re: How to tell why a computer rebooted

#4 2009-12-29 17:56:10

Re: How to tell why a computer rebooted

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