On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 02:47:46AM -0700, Joe Emenaker wrote: > Every now and then, I'll have a Debian box that starts having fits of hard > system hangs. Sometimes, it goes away when I turn off a daemon. Other times, > it goes away when I put the hard drives in an entirely different computer. > > Currently, I'm having this problem with one. Just... out of the blue, it > will hang dead in its tracks. The keyboard doesn't even wake the screen so I > can see if there are any kernel panic messages or anything. Ctrl-Alt-Del > doesn't do anything. I have to hit the rest button. > > It doesn't seem to matter what's running becuase I've tried turning almost > all of the daemons (except cron and a couple of others) off, and it still > hung. It's happening more and more frequently, too. It used to be able to go > for a week or two. Now, it barely makes it more than 4 hours or so.
I had a very similar problem with a 486 here some time ago ... > Now, I'm pretty certain that it's some hardware problem. But, I'd like to > avoid moving the whole system to a brand-new machine, find that the problem > has gone away, and conclude that there's just *something* bad about the old > server and that I need to chuck the whole thing. ... and this is what I was thinking at the time as well. But it wasn't. > So, I'd like to isolate the problem, if I could. > > With that in mind, does anyone have any personal experience concerning what > the problem usually is in these cases? Motherboard? RAM? Has it ever helped > anyone to *under*clock the CPU? > > I'm anxious for any ideas.... What it turned out to be in my case was the kernel. I was running 2.2.10 or .11 - unfortunately it was long enough ago that I don't remember exactly which. But when I upgraded to the latest (at the time that was 2.2.13) the problem went away. It seems that the kernel I had been using had some memory leak somewhere. I'm not saying that this *is* your problem ... I'm just saying that when I had a similar problem that's what fixed it for me. -- Mike Werner KA8YSD | "Where do you want to go today?" ICQ# 12934898 | "As far from Redmond as possible!" '91 GS500E | Morgantown WV | Only dead fish go with the flow.
