Spinning wheel, can't log in, can't reboot

[gero]

Hi,

I'm facing a annoying problem on my mac mini running OS X 10.4.8.

The Mini is acting as a server and therefore running 24x7. I've configured it such that it locks the screen after 30 minutes and roughly every other day I'm not able to log in any more after the screen is locked. The screen stays black and is only shows the 'rainbow' colored spinning wheel. No way to get it.

I can access it remotely using SSH and the webserver, IMAP server etc can also still be accessed remotely. When I log in using SSH and do a 'top' command, it shows no heavy CPU or other usage. In fact all looks fine.

The weird thing is however, that I'm not able to reboot it by using a 'sudo reboot' command. I does display a message stating that it will reboot, but nothing happens. The only way to get in again is by pushing the on/off button :-(

Any ideas what might be causing this behavior? I really would like to fix this, cause this way the Mini is not really a stable server.

Regards,
Gero

[darrell888]

If you get the spinning rainbow pointer and there is no CPU activity, there is some other resource blocking the system. You have to remember that CPU is just one of many resources in a computer. Approximately 80% of the time you will see the CPU activity at 100% and a specific task will be the problem.
The other 20% of the time it will be something else. On a guess, network access tends to be a common reason for the computer to lock.

What you can do is check to see if there are any logs with information to explain things. Generally speaking, I like to look at all logs in a computer because it give me insight into what the computer is doing as well as what information is available.

If you go to spotlight and enter 'Terminal' you will be able to run an xterm (I'm guessing you know this but other might not). From an xterm use sudo to run bash. Once you sudo a bash shell, you are root and can do anything; be careful. Run the following:

find / -name "*.log" -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

This will find all files which end with .log and give you a long listing of them. Have a look a the various logs and see what they contain. You can also look at the dates for the logs. You obviously can ignore logs which haven't been written to for a while. For your problem, the logs in /private/var/log might hold some helpful information. Another location would be the /Users logs, e.g. my account is 'darrell' so I have logs in /Users/darrell/Library/Logs.

If you are in the /private/var/log directory, you can see which files were modified most recently by issuing:

ls -ltr

The most recently modified file will be at the bottom of the list (-t for sorting and -r for reverse order).

Hopefully you'll see something in the logs which will jump out at you and make the problem apparent. You can also look at the times in the logs and narrow down what was happening when logging in stopped working.

Good luck,
Darrell

[gero]

Hi,

I was using MAMP to host website, use php etc. Since recently I switched back to the standard Apache webserver in Tiger and removed MAMP and now the spinning wheel is gone and the machine performs much better ;-)

Gero