[lug] Reboot Problem

[Alan Robertson]

rm at fabula.de wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 10:50:51AM -0600, Sexton, George wrote:
> 
>>Memtest is so easy to do, that I routinely do it when I have a problem. Even
>>if I suspected IDE problems I would still run it first.
>>
> 
> Yeah, when we set up new server hardware fort customers we routinely set
> up a small partition and put memtest on it. We add an extra entry to lilo.conf
> and whenever a box shows strange behaviour we can ask the service tech.
> (most boxes are in large scale sever housing) to reboot and type memtest
> at the lilo prompt -- can save you a lot of time (and a trip to the other
> side of the contry).
>  
>   Ralf

SuSE comes with it on the CD set (as you guys in .de probably know ;-)).  It 
installs it by default and makes it accessible from LILO.  You can even take 
a SuSE CD and run memtest on a windows box ;-)  I offered to kiss the feet 
of the guy in SuSE who put it on the distro.  Fortunately, he's in Europe, 
so I didn't have to do it ;-)

They put it in because up to 1/3 of all brand new memory is actually 
defective!  There was an article in c't magazine about this which prompted 
them to realize that a lot of their customers thought Linux crashed because 
of bugs when it was really bad memory.

It's a great lever to have when talking to the person who sold you a machine 
about replacing bad memory.  It's a real Godsend.

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr at unix.sh