[plug] [OT-ish?] Need help diagnosing unstable computer

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 08:05:53PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
| In message <20030807114232.GA603 at erdos.home>
| on Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 07:42:32PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
| > I'm reasonably sure that this is a hardware issue - the machine didn't
| > respond to Ctrl-Alt-{Backspace,Delete} or SysRq-B, and the keyboard
| > lights weren't doing the kernel panic thing.  The crashes seem to be
| > occurring more-or-less randomly.
| 
| I don't suppose any useful log messages managed to make their way to the
| disk before the hangs?

Not really :(  Last few lines of /var/log/kern.log before a crash and
the first few afterwards:

Aug  7 20:13:58 erdos kernel: hub.c: 3 ports detected
Aug  7 20:13:58 erdos kernel: blk: queue c03fa260, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
Aug  7 20:13:58 erdos kernel: hde: CHECK for good STATUS
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: klogd 1.4.1#11, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: Inspecting /boot/System.map-2.4.21-cjp-erdos-2
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: Loaded 21250 symbols from /boot/System.map-2.4.21-cjp-erdos-2.
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.4.21.
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: Loaded 206 symbols from 5 modules.
Aug  7 20:16:38 erdos kernel: Linux version 2.4.21-cjp-erdos-2 (cameron at erdos) (gcc version 3.3.1 20030722 (Debian prerelease)) #1 Sun Aug 3 12:49:25 WST 2003

There's nothing remotely interesting in daemon.log either.

(Incidentally it died twice in the last 15 minutes - once while I was
writing a reply and then again while loading up KDE. Aieee!)

Re. what Nema said: this, to me, doesn't smell like a memory issue, and
as I mentioned I've run memtest86 on the machine for a short time to no
avail.  I may leave memtest running over night and/or while I'm at Murdoch
tomorrow, just in case...

Cameron.