[H-GEN] Kernel Panic! :)

[Stuart Longland]

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James Mills wrote:
| [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
| [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
|
| On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 11:33:33AM +0200, Bruce Campbell wrote:
|
|>None of your other machines are that particular machine, with that
|>particular (possible suspect) set of cpu/ram/disk oddities.
|>
|>The only time you can consider one machine's problems to be representative
|>of a group of machines are when they are pretty much the same machine in
|>specifications/load/etc.  In your average geek household, this is rare.
|
|
| Hate to terribly disappoint you :)
|
| But Every single one of my machines (except my Desktop and two Laptops)
| are the same!

With the same faults?  They may be identical in terms of what you put
in, but who's to say they will stay that way?  Random pieces of hardware
go ratty at random times.  I think you'd be more correct saying they
*were* the same at time of purchase.

I'd say Nickolai would be right on the money with the cron issue.  If a
bunch of cron jobs start stirring up the I/O channels, and DMA is
enabled, quite naturally you'll get problems about that time in the morning.

Back December, 2001, both my father and I upgraded our boxes to Dual
PIII 1GHz machines w/ 512MB RAM.  They were practically identical except
for video card, sound card & drives.[1]  At some point down the track,
one of the sticks of RAM in my box died.

Initially, Windows 2000 started to bluescreen, but Linux ran fine -- I
also had Solaris 8, running fine.  A few weeks later, Linux started to
fall over, oddly enough whilst doing I/O with the hard drives.  Tried
Solaris -- same thing, heavy disk I/O caused a crash & read errors.

I pulled the drives out and threw them into an old AMD K6-2 box we had
laying around -- Linux booted just fine, no problems.  We decided that
the IDE controller onboard had gone ratty, so my motherboard took a
needless holiday in Taiwan only for Asus to send it back.  It was once I
put the box back together and had the problem still present, that
triggered me to check the RAM.  Running memtest86 allowed me to
determine which stick was at fault -- the problem disappeared when I
pulled it out.

Apart from that, at the time, the boxes were practically identical.
Yet, my box had the fault, my father's didn't.

I'd suggest you check the RAM, then perhaps swap the hardware between it
and an identical box to see if you can track down the fault.

- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Atomic Linux Project    <--->    http://atomicl.berlios.de/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Footnotes:
	1. My box: Sony IDE DVD Reader, Radeon 7000  64MB AGP Video, Vibra128
Audio.  Father's box: nVidia Riva TNT2 32MB, SB Live! Value audio, Sony
IDE CD-ROM drive.
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