On my ToDo lsit for tomorrow: check why my computer suddently fell out while I was surfing. The last entry in syslog before the instant power off is a warning of cron, which couldn’t find sigfile. Can cron really let your system crash that abruptly?
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If you mean that it was in fact a sudden loss of power, it could possibly be a hardware issue; maybe the motherboard or power supply or something is failing. It has happened to me. The way you describe it makes me think it is hardware, not software, that caused the failure.
Computer powering off randomly is sad (it occasionally happens to me, but usually it’s *some* form of power glitch…it’s why I ended up buying a UPS).
The “Sigfile not found” message is likely unrelated and innocuous (I get them too). They’re caused by pam_ecryptfs. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ecryptfs/+bug/293434 and http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/mhalcrow/ecryptfs-utils.git;a=commit;h=fb5dc42750c745d807921d59d7d99ffda6d857a6
Thank you for your replies!
Do you know a program to detect such hardware failures?