Debian Testing random freeze (ANACRON)

[Deb-fan]

Page 2.

Knew ive looked into that, getting rid of cron-etc and using timers, remember was a reason i backed off too, that being apps-etc which might rely on cron, the person in this mentions a/one solution.

https://coderich.net/2019/11/07/systemd-timers-vs-cron/

Though such is bound to change as more n more is converted to take advantage of systemd's features. Guy also notes systemd already has an easy means of seeing if any timers fail.

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systemctl list-units --failed

Cool, occurs to me implementing the hair brainedness outlined above into cron jobs could be good practice, something that's working now might not keep working w system changes, reconfigs, upgrades etc. Probably already plenty of means to handle ana/cron logging, only a random thought and yeppers still going to end up ditching cron-etc in favor of timers here.

[Danielsan]

Updating bios is not trivial. There is risk of bricking your system.
If you feel the error is due to cron/anacron you can make a note of all cron tasks and then simply uninstall cron and anacron. And check if that fixes it. Then you can re-create the essential tasks or simply create systemd.timers for them.

That sounds rational, I could simply rename/move them and see what happen. Yesterday night I used Zoom + Firefox for 4 hours and nothing happened, I reinstalled also the amd microcode and the amd firmware that worked with the wifi, but this morning around 8 am it got stuck again.

Big +1 @sickpig, the logs did catch it apparently and a good eye by @sgosnell for weeding through them, any way had some brainfarts to add to this mess, running xyz-jobs manually, one-by-one, if while doing so you experience a reboot/freeze or crash, clearly you need to rework that cron-job, script ... whatever.

Systemd hasn't any units failed, everything works fine with it.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

testing has its sense, if I can isolated the issue I can report the bug and helping for the next stable release

Very laudable: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

[Danielsan]

Very laudable: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

I have to go through this process if I want find a solution, my only limit is the spare time that mostly overlaps 0...

By the way I should try at least with the kernel in stable and see what happens...

[Danielsan]

I think I just found a temporary workaround... I hope this will work. The freezes always happen almost at the same time, often I turn on the laptop ten minutes before the class beigins (8 am) and it get stuck (often) within 10 minutes. If the issue is a unpredictable combination of anacron, kernel, Firefox and Zoom maybe I can avoid it if anacron starts and finishes before the class, hence today I turned on the laptop earlier and so far it seems it hasn't frozen. Then I just figured out that I can change the behavior of anacron and making it starts after my son's classes... Maybe it might work...

[Danielsan]

It seems that it worked, the computer didn't freeze yesterday not a single a time!

Hence I added this line on anacrontab:

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START_HOURS_RANGE=22-6

Now anacron will always run when my Son hasn't school!