[K12OSN] Strange Lockups

[Daniel Loomis]

I am running k12ltsp 3.1.0 on a server with Tyan S2460 MB, 2 Athlon 1400
MPs, Adaptec 29160 SCSI and IBM 40 Gig SCSI HD, two 3c905tx and one
Intel E1000 nics. The server has worked flawlessly for nearly three
years.  Now it locks up without warning.  Sometimes it does so under
load, but at others it just locks up in the middle of the night without
any load.

I suspect it is a hardware problem, since the logs give no indication of
the problem. It just locks up without warning.  Nothing in
/var/log/messages.  I did catch it one time with a bunch of screen
garbage and something about interrputs, but nothing made much sense. 
The next time it just went to sleep in the middle of a login.  The time
after that everything went well and ran for a while until it locked up
while running yum update.

Since the Tyan S2460 is a popular server board for LTSP systems, I
thought someone might be able to suggest a method of diagnosing the
problem. The Tyan website is useless.  All they have is monitoring
software that works with Win2k.  What I need is something like AMIDIAG,
only this is not an AMI bios motherboard.

All fans are working well.  Both cpus appear to be cooling just fine. 
There is no excess heat in the case.  Unfortunately, I do not know of
any diagnostics that can be run from Linux or use a boot disk. I have
never tried to implement lm_sensors, but that would only tell me if the
cpu temps are excessive, which I do not believe is the case.

Are there any diagnostics in Knoppix or one of the bootable CDROMS that
might work with a dual cpu Tyan mb?

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. But, if it shares any of the electronics
with their famous "Death Star" ide drives, that would explain a lot.  I
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.

I am open to suggestions.

Dan