new yosemite server- having random restarts, etc...?

hi all, posting here cause not sure where else...

after 8 or 9 years on the venerable xserve, i've recently migrated my server hardware and os: xserve 1,1/os 10.6.8 server to mac mini 2014/os 10.10.1-server 4. both systems run essentially:

mac server - web, mail, xmpp, wiki, cal, od master, file server
indigo - lights, alarm, hvac, irrigation, a/v, other automation
serial bridge (xserve only, switched to plugin on new system) - alarm int'fce
itunes - music/video system server (apple tv's and mac mini and airport xpresses)
ired - a/v control
phone valet - phone vm and mgmt
slimserver (logitech) - audio server (transporter and slimplayers)
security spy - cctv monitoring
telnet/scripting for remoting/integrating several of the above
etc.

i have a couple issues cropping up, one is just frustrating and probably an os thing that will hopefully be sorted shortly, the other a legacy software issue that just doesn't gracefully leave me in peace...

1. mac mini suffering random unprovoked reboots. i will periodically - sometimes once a week, other times twice a day - get a notification that the server has rebooted. this manifests sometimes as the alarm in the house disarming and rearming in succession. perhaps a flaw in the dsc plugin initialization, or a leftover command string.. i don't know.. but it's frustrating. is anyone else having this experience with random restarts?? no idea if this is related to indigo at all, but thought there are so many savvy people on this board it's a good place to ask...

2. phonevalet. much loved, sometimes maligned... and now gone forever. i heard stories of people getting it to run in yosemite... i myself have not. mainly i think because of an openbase db access issue i can't seem to sort out. also it's 32 bit only i think... they stopped supporting it years ago now. if anyone out there has some pointers for getting it running in my system... greatly appreciated.

3. and maybe related to (1), is often i'll experience an app - finder, or ired or terminal or security spy - running ok. or sometimes hung, but when i click its icon in the dock it either unfreezes or crashes altogether. sometimes the finder just relaunches... no apparent reason.* i'm not taxing the system in any way, plenty of free ram, disc, cpu... it's just little gremlins. again, hopefully an os thing a not-too-distant future update will sort.. but if anyone has thoughts, i'm happy to hear them.

*note here that i run the system 'headless', admining by vnc, often from other countries and counties.. sometimes this contributes to funky finder behavior.. ffb in the parlance. that said, this level of instability in general is not my usual at all. usually a very tight ship on that server.



thanks for listening, much appreciated.


dt

1. mac mini suffering random unprovoked reboots. i will periodically - sometimes once a week, other times twice a day - get a notification that the server has rebooted.

There should be some indication in the logs of the reboot and, hopefully, the cause... try running the Console application after a reboot and seeing if there is any clue in there around the reboot time. Sometimes the issue is obvious and other times it is near impossible to find where the trouble is logged (and sometimes not logged at all...) I would attempt to get the reboot problem out of the way before addressing the others.

Adam

yes.. can't find anything of interest in the log so far... will post next time it occurs. thx

1. mac mini suffering random unprovoked reboots. i will periodically - sometimes once a week, other times twice a day - get a notification that the server has rebooted. this manifests sometimes as the alarm in the house disarming and rearming in succession. perhaps a flaw in the dsc plugin initialization, or a leftover command string.. i don't know.. but it's frustrating. is anyone else having this experience with random restarts?? no idea if this is related to indigo at all, but thought there are so many savvy people on this board it's a good place to ask...

This probably won't help you much, but its some experience: I was running Indigo on Yosemite on an old MacBook Pro during the eval period. No random restarts. For production, I wound up buying a used mid-2012 mac mini. I'm keeping it on mavericks for now. I run iStat Menus http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/ on all of my machines to monitor resources. Usually the CPU runs over 100 degrees, at least. At first I placed the mac in a non-temperature controlled environment and when it got too cold (ambient temp in the 30s) the FDTI USB drivers was causing a CPU panic followed, of course by reboot. This continued until the machine warmed back up.

Not sure if this helps at all, but you never know.

Jeff

[jay (support)]

1. mac mini suffering random unprovoked reboots. i will periodically - sometimes once a week, other times twice a day - get a notification that the server has rebooted. this manifests sometimes as the alarm in the house disarming and rearming in succession. perhaps a flaw in the dsc plugin initialization, or a leftover command string.. i don't know.. but it's frustrating. is anyone else having this experience with random restarts?? no idea if this is related to indigo at all, but thought there are so many savvy people on this board it's a good place to ask...

I doubt this has anything to do with Indigo - there's not much an app can do to cause a reboot given the sandboxing that surround apps in these latest OS releases. Indigo doesn't have anything in the code that would request a Mac restart. You might want to look around at your AppleScripts to see if you have one that's causing a reboot.

2. phonevalet. much loved, sometimes maligned... and now gone forever. i heard stories of people getting it to run in yosemite... i myself have not. mainly i think because of an openbase db access issue i can't seem to sort out. also it's 32 bit only i think... they stopped supporting it years ago now. if anyone out there has some pointers for getting it running in my system... greatly appreciated.

PhoneValet is dead - long live PhoneValet. I still have it running on my 10.6.8 server but only to detect hook status (it pauses iTunes if necessary when the phone goes off hook and starts it back up when the phone goes on hook). It stopped announcing who's calling a year or so ago. I have no hope of it working on any upgrades going forward.

3. and maybe related to (1), is often i'll experience an app - finder, or ired or terminal or security spy - running ok. or sometimes hung, but when i click its icon in the dock it either unfreezes or crashes altogether. sometimes the finder just relaunches... no apparent reason.* i'm not taxing the system in any way, plenty of free ram, disc, cpu... it's just little gremlins. again, hopefully an os thing a not-too-distant future update will sort.. but if anyone has thoughts, i'm happy to hear them.

Unfortunately, you don't appear to be alone in this. There are sporadic reports on the web about very strange and random things happening with Yosemite. Personally, I would (if possible) revert back to Mavericks until the Yosemite bugs are worked out. I've not updated any of my Macs to Yosemite short of installing it on a separate partition for testing - just too many reports of bad behavior out there for me to feel comfortable taking the plunge.

[MODERATOR NOTE] Moved to a more appropriate forum since it's not specifically about the IndigoServer app.

@jeff:

thanks, i run istats too, love it... no i don't think temp is an issue here.. the fdti driver is an interesting thought, i'll scrutinize the log for it.. but, knock on wood, no random restarts in the last 36 hours. go figure. i did update to the latest server release... could have done something.

@jay:

thanks for the thoughts. agreeing with you.. but too late to go back to mavericks or anything else really... now out of town, and i don't do any major sw changes remotely.... need to be next to the machine in case a finger is needed, lol.... i'll stick it out and see what new os updates bring in the way of stability. also having some pretty killer issues with mac server.. calendar web services and wiki services are not playing nice... really frustrating. hopefully apple gets on the stick asap.


thanks for the responses!

hi all.

so, had another incident, or two, with restarts. i think it is indigo restarting. or, really, crashing, and not restarting.. as what happened is i get a no connect to server via web interface even though i have a vnc connect to the server itself running fine. so indigo is crashing without auto restarting, both of which are weird and not in my previous experience.

i know mac os may have something to do w this, and maybe there are other factors... i have scanned the syslog and see several entries relevant, but not sure what to make of it. matt, jay, anyone, when you have a sec, if you want to search the attached for dsc, or indigo, you will find the pertinent sections.... very curious any thoughts.

this is disconcerting as what seems to be happening is indigo dumps, then doesn't reboot, so alarm and other variables go out of sync.. then when i restart manually after noticing it the alarm disarms and arms immediately, which is also an issue especially if i have people in the house. d'oh.

so. any thoughts appreciated. also, maybe try to send to travis to see if he has any insight into the plugin behavior and how to get it a little more play-nice. maybe it's just shutting down because indserv did. not sure chicken or egg here. there're several things the log that concern me, not indserv related. any thoughts on those appreciated too.

thanks!!

[matt (support)]

So from the crash log it looks like it cratered pretty far down inside the AppleScript interpreter. I'm not positive, but it looks like it might have been executing a script that was making some remote AppleScript ("tell machine") calls. Do you have any scripts that are targeting other Macs? If so, try temporarily disabling those to see if that narrows down the problem.

Unfortunately AppleScript has been getting more and more irascible in the last few major Mac OS releases. One of the reasons why we are full on board the python train now, although AppleScript is still the only game in town when it comes to communicating with lots of apps.

copy that! i do, yes. i will disable that sucker asap.

thanks for that matt.

er, i thought it was one script that was a remote machine control shell, but.. now i'm afraid it's the remote iTunes machine control (the main stereo system uses a remote mac mini as its audio interface).... any way to tell which machine is being called that's causing the trouble? is there an ip address or a specific command in the log where you were looking matt that might give me a clue about which script is functioning at the crash?

when u have a sec. anyway, thanks.

[matt (support)]

Unfortunately, that level of detail isn't available in the Event Log. All I can see is the internal Mac OS function names of the call stack, which tells me it is definitely in AppleScript and some of the function names point towards a remote machine target call being made.

Indigo now has native iTunes actions for play/pause/stop/etc which use python and IP instead of AppleScript. It is possible though that your script is more involved than what is exposed by the new actions.

here's a weird wrinkle...

still getting random ind serv restarts. sometimes it skips a few days, sometimes it goes two days in a row.. i've noticed that the time of the restart has been 9:55am.. several times. and i noticed that was the time on a restart today.. and YESTERDAY. huh? there is nothing scheduled at that time. or even near it.. there is nothing in the event log. i can't really see anything in the syslog either. so wacky. i can't think of one thing that would be calling at this time everyday. even a repeating event, like updates.. for example an iTunes update or what have you. it would call if an action is taken, or sometimes there is a heartbeat update every chunk of time... but that would happen non stop all day. why at this particular moment does it choose to restart?? so weird.

here's ind log, any particular part of a sys log you think i can post that might have a pointer?

Code: Select all

2015-01-20 09:00:00.198   Schedule   weather update every 15min
2015-01-20 09:00:00.198   Action Group   weather_update vars
2015-01-20 09:15:00.232   Schedule   weather update every 15min
2015-01-20 09:15:00.232   Action Group   weather_update vars
2015-01-20 09:30:00.265   Schedule   weather update every 15min
2015-01-20 09:30:00.265   Action Group   weather_update vars
2015-01-20 09:45:00.297   Schedule   weather update every 15min
2015-01-20 09:45:00.297   Action Group   weather_update vars
2015-01-20 09:55:20.919   Application   Starting Indigo Server version 6.0.20 (Mac OS X 10.10.1)
2015-01-20 09:55:20.920   Application   Loading attachments
2015-01-20 09:55:20.922   Application   "device target attachment.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.922   Application   "dt device status updater.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.923   Application   "dt growlnotify.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.923   Application   "dt growlregister.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.924   Application   "dt ired attach.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.926   Application   "dt itunes script_remote.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.926   Application   "dt pv attach.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.927   Application   "dt remote machine script.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.928   Application   "dt security spy script.scpt" script loaded
2015-01-20 09:55:20.929   Application   

[jay (support)]

So, in the Console app you see nothing interesting happening between 9:45 and 9:55?

i can't sort it out.. the reboot is there, which didn't seem like it was happening, the physical server i mean. because the mail server, etc, never went (seemingly) down.. but maybe it just happens too fast (love that ssd, so great to finally get it on the server).

i've attached the log section. anything jump out?? i just can't decipher enough of it. it reads to me like there may be a couple different things not working correctly truthfully, but can't tell what's causing a reboot.


thx jay.

[matt (support)]

Nothing jumping out at me in that log file, unfortunately.

Just to double-check, your Energy Saver control panel is not showing that you have any restarts scheduled correct? (if only it were that easy, right?)

I wonder if there is a problem on the power side. I've had Mac's reboot spontaneously when their power supplies are starting to malfunction.

If you have a spare Mac mini, then I would suggest cloning your drive to an external drive then booting off of the other mini from that. That would be a relatively fast way to rule out some type of hardware problem (memory, CPU, power supply). I think figuring out if this is a software problem (corrupt OS, etc.) or a hardware issue is probably the most important troubleshooting step at this point.