On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 11:53:05PM +0000, Mike -- EMAIL IGNORED wrote: > On Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:03:49 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > > Mike -- EMAIL IGNORED wrote: > >> My Centos 5.2 box shuts itself down during a long tar -x. There is > >> plenty of disk available. This is new; it worked in the past. > >> > >> Any suggestions? > > > > Are you dropping things on top of running programs (like tar itself) or > > /proc or /sys? > > I hope not; I am putting the result in a data directory. Has your machine got a bad CPU cooling fan? The work involved in bulk operations like that might be causing it to overheat and perform a thermal shutdown.... or simply crash. I had a Windows machine that would work just fine, except one program would cause a crash after 10 minutes; turns out it was stressing the CPU and causing overheating problems 'cos the CPU fan had died! Nothing else was causing enough workload to cause the problem. -- rgds Stephen