xserve

What to do with a seemingly dead server

Dave had an interesting problem the other day - whilst the Xserve was functioning normally, he couldn’t access the server using either Apple Remote Desktop nor physically plugging a monitor into the back and the processor usage lights were just over half way. He was however, able to SSH in.

Rebooting the server was out of the question as people were working from it, so our intrepid tech spent the entire morning looking for a solution. It turned out that the CoreGraphics service had crashed, so killing it forced it to restart:

  • First log into the machine as an administrator over SSH
  • Type “ps -A” to list all processes
  • Then type “kill PID” Where the PID is the number next to System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
    CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon

After you kill the process OS X will automatically restart it and all will be well again. This was performed on OS X 10.5 Leopard Server.
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