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Topic: Multifaceted Problem: Random Crashes and Empty Logs (Read 31 times) previous topic - next topic
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Multifaceted Problem: Random Crashes and Empty Logs

Greetings, all.

Ever since my system update at the end of last month, I've been experiencing random crashes. The problems started with my PC ceasing to send activity signals to my monitor apparently whenever it went to sleep or anything else that'd eventually cause the monitor to power down. (I read somewhere that it could be the graphics card turning off the port for some reason. The port in question is an HDMI port.) At first, I was able to get the signal sent again, but those times were flukes, and I couldn't remember what was done. I soon found that turning off the monitor, specifically, was what made this happen, and wrote a small Bash script that'd use xrandr to restart the display and bound the execution thereof to a shortcut. Rough solution, but it worked--for that problem.

Eventually (around the 15th), I performed a system upgrade, thinking that perhaps the problem was from upstream somewhere; that solved that problem...until it didn't--and I found that my PC was adding unresponsiveness to the display signal loss. Ever since that started, my PC would crash randomly; I couldn't pin down rhyme or reason for it, as it happened totally randomly: when playing games, when using a word processor, when reading a PDF, when watching a video on Youtube, or even trying to invoke dmesg right after such a crash. I ran GSmartControl, and my applicable drives--which include that which Artix is installed to and my main data drive--are all healthy, having passed their tests. I also thought that perhaps caffeine-ng--which, I saw, hadn't been maintained for many years--was causing this instability, so I uninstalled that and used Xfce's Presentation Mode instead, but that did not help.

That leads to my second problem. Looking at dmesg doesn't tell me a lot--I don't know how to read the output, and I don't see more than one timestamp in the output of any given invocation, which usually isn't the day of the incident. It's pretty much the only log I can look at, as--and this is the heart of the second problem--almost all other logs in /var/log are empty. The only ones that aren't are Xorg.0.log, rc.log, qemu-ga.log, pacman.log, and the aforementioned dmesg.

Can anyone help me stop these random system failures, and restore logging functionality to my PC? Also, can anyone tell me how to read these log files' timestamps (I'm sure they have them) and to use them for troubleshooting, or how to troubleshoot problems in general? Back when I used Windows, I had the Event Viewer, which was usually helpful, but what I have now--I think it's syslog-ng--has never been the clearest/most user-friendly in reporting occurrences within my PC, and so I'd end up unable to fix my PC problems myself. Now, /var/log has a bunch of empty documents, so it's even less helpful than it was before. I do not know what to do with syslog-ng.conf either, by the way; I chose not to tinker with it ignorantly.