[lug] Daily system crash....

[Stephen Queen]

On Jan 25, 2008 12:12 PM, David Morris <lists at morris-clan.net> wrote:
> I have a strange problem with my system I'm hoping for input
> on.
>
> I run Debian Testing (lenny) 64-bit (AMD64).  After a recent
> update to the latest version of available packages my system
> started crashing once a day.
>
> The crash is a complete system lockup.  No response locally
> or when I attempt to ssh in from a remote computer.  System
> logs contain no indication of the cause of the problem.  At
> the time of the crash I have always been actively using the
> system (not surprising given I work from home), however I
> was only typing at the time.  The only other processes
> running are XMMS, Pidgin, VIM editors, ssh sessions, and
> sometimes a few with 'tail -f' running on them.  At every
> crash I have been typing in a VIM editor in a terminal
> window (mrxvt) either on a local or remote system, but then
> I do that constantly throughout the day.
>
> Ordinarily I would suspect a hardware problem (Motherboard,
> CPU, or RAM), however two things lead me to believe this
> might not be the case:
>
> - The first instance was a few hours after a big update of
>   Debian packages.
> - Not reproducible on demand, but randomly once every 12-36
>   hours which usually indicates a software problem.
>
> I plan to run memtest86, however this will need to wait
> until tonight.
>
> Any suggestions on how I might glean more insight into the
> cause of the problem given nothing shows up in the syslog?

I had a similar issue with an AMD 64 machine at work. I suspected it
had something to do with the network cards. I grab the latest kernel
from kernel.org, compiled and installed it, and have not had a crash
since.

Steve Queen