[plug] Random crashes

[Keith Bawden]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 18:48, Kai <vk6ksj at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> I was home for holidays in July, built a machine a few days before I left,
> got it working with Ubuntu and it looked good but maybe the power supply is
> a bit variable with the wattage it supplies, not sure what the problem is
> but it'll run fine for a sporadic amount of time, sometimes minutes other
> times it'll go for a week or so...then crash.
>

I would "guess"memory, mainboard or PSU (as you suggested),  . A
pretty wide spectrum but that is the nature of such things ;)

Memory - Google for memtest86+. Once you find out how I would run
memtest for a day or so and see what you can find. One full run
through of all tests may not uncover a problem with the memory.

PSU - no idea how to test this one really besides checking the specs
for it and then calculating the load you have on it. Keep in mind, the
load on the PSU can go up and "trip" it if it is the host gets hot
(especially under load) and your fans are spinning at max.

Mainboard - If the board has some kind of management/diagnostics tool
then use that to run tests against it (and the rest of the system). If
that is not available then after running memtest grep -i for interrupt
(acpi is also another possibility) related errors in the log files and
the output of dmesg. These errors do not necessarily mean a main board
issue however if memtest returns clean results then these errors may
be indicative of the main board being horked.

Regards, Keith