[olug] Intriguing random hangs!

[kaygee]

All,
It's been an interesting week for my desktop box.  It started going
downhill when I added a stick of PC100 128M to my box running FreeBSD.
Well, netscape started exiting on startup with bus errors which isn't
unusual for netscape, but I also started getting freezes and hangs which
had never happened before so I put my bus back to 66Mhz (it had been at
83) and went to more conservative memory timings.  Things kept going bad
until FreeBSD would no longer find the kernel on boot so I decided to
scrap it and install Debian again (after moving my mp3's to my 1G
harddrive (/dev/hdb).  Anyway, before I did that I wanted to test the
memory to see if it was defective so I ran memtest86 for about 20 hrs
without a single error.  Satisfied, I started installing Debian (slink 2.1
are the only disks I have), but the crashes continued.  I started to
suspect the processor and wanted to do some round-robin kernel compiles to
stress it and see if heat was an issue (it's never been before), but I
couldn't even get to a point where I could compile the kernel (much less
untar it) before things would hang (hard) and even the three-fingered
salute wouldn't bring it back (a hang during a vigorous fsck is not a good
thing :).  So, thinking these Debian disks might be flaky I installed an
old Suse distro I had lying around which is why I can write this, but the
kernel has already dumped core once this session although no hangs have
occurred.

Anyone have any bright ideas to volunteer.  If not I'll be working from
Suse console for a while until I get the box back on it's feet.  It's hard
to find time to do this when I should be study Neuroscience.  Anyway,
sorry for the long post but I needed to do some venting and get some other
opinions, and I'm sure this beats hearing about Jason's DHCP problems. :)
Ha, just kidding.

P.S. If someone would like to burn me a Potato CD I'd be grateful.  No
hurry though as long as I don't have a solid machine to install it on.

Peace.

Keith
----------
There's ease of use and then there's ease of usefulness.
Choose usefulness. Choose Linux.


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