# Random reboots - how to track down the cause?



## darrendavid (Apr 29, 2014)

Hi all-

In the past few days, my system has started randomly rebooting on a regular basis, perhaps once an hour. I'm sure it's based on some recent change to userland software, but I'm not seeing any smoking guns in /var/log/messages. What's a good triage process to figure who what the offender is?

Thanks,
Darren


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## wblock@ (Apr 29, 2014)

If it was working reliably before, the question to ask is: "What changed?"

Hardware:
Did a partly-clogged fan finally go full dustbunny?  Have power supply capacitors bulged and failed?  Did RAM fail?

Software:
Did an application update introduce a problem?  Did an operating system update cause a regression?


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## jalla (Apr 29, 2014)

Enable crashdumps for a start (put dumpdev=AUTO in /etc/rc.conf). The crash() manpage gives some info on how to proceed from that.


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