I figured I should share this result from the crashtesters.
One of our crashtesters installed Traktopel Beta 2 and was running
compilation programs.
And his memory was used up... his swap was hit hard... and the system
informed him it was out of memory and shutting down bash.
Reinstall--same technique, same symptom.
Fortunately the crashtesters have scripts that phone home with configuration
information.
I spotted a WD and a Maxtor on IDE0 and recommended he separate them--one on
ide1 and one on ide0. He did this.
Another reinstall -- same technique NO symptom--been reunning well since that
time.
Timing chatter on the IDE bus Some DVD-ROMs on VIA chipsets can cause
corruption of install-time data on hard disks past kernel 2.2.15. WD and
Maxtor of same speed or a slower WD with a fast Maxtor master will just eat
your data with timing chatter.
And since WD doesn't do the CRCs necessary to check, you can actually boot
and run on a corrupted system (for a little while, anyway).
Civileme
