[K12OSN] Strange Lockups
Les Mikesell
les at futuresource.com
Fri Feb 18 04:26:11 UTC 2005
On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 20:23, Daniel Loomis wrote:
> I suspect it is a hardware problem, since the logs give no indication of
> the problem. It just locks up without warning.
Based on nothing in particular, I always suspect power supplies
first when I have mysterious crashes - and they are usually
easy to swap.
> Are there any diagnostics in Knoppix or one of the bootable CDROMS that
> might work with a dual cpu Tyan mb?
There is a memory test on fedora/k12ltsp install CD's but it
takes a long time to run.
> My suspicions at this point is that the IBM SCSI harddrive is getting
> flaky. It works fine and hasn't started showing up with any errors. It
> is a 10,000 rpm 36gb model.
You'll generally see scsi errors in the log (dmesg or
/var/log/messages) with mildly flakey drives. I'd expect that
model to have SMART capability. Are you running smartd? As a
brute-force check you can 'cat /dev/sda >/dev/null' and
watch for error messages on the console or logs.
> But, if it shares any of the electronics
> with their famous "Death Star" ide drives, that would explain a lot.
They made a bad batch of 72gig scsi's a while back but I don't
think there were ever generic problems with 36gig models.
> will probably order a new scsi drive just to be on the safe side, but if
> it is the MB going South, I would like to know that up front.
Running RAID1 is the safest option, but smartd should warn you
if a drive is failing slowly.
--
Les Mikesell
les at futuresource.com
More information about the K12OSN
mailing list