[K12OSN] segmentation faults can it be fixed

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 19:17 -0500, cisna-barry at wc235.k12.il.us wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> Wondering if anyone has ever found an actual fix for a box that has
> started getting segmentaion faults while booting up. On my old
> experimental K12LTSP 4.4.1 box at home, which is an ancient 1GHZ
> processor,which has run fine for a year now, after a couple power outages
> this box is now getting segmenation faults as it proceeds through the
> bootup process. It will actually still work, IF i manually start each of
> the two nics,and i also have to manually start dhcp,each timeafter a
> reboot. I also have to reset the hostanme by doing a  <echo
> myserver.dot..com > /proc/sys/kernel/hostname> to set the hostname after
> each reboot. I tried booting the machine in single user mode and run fsck
> which seem to run way too fast ( about 3 secs).? I have not tried running
> memtest86 from the FC4 boot CD,, but as per usual im guessing this would
> be " too simple" a fix.
> Lots of things dont actually work right such as ps, ls sound ..but it is
> usable.
> Im guessing its time for  a reformat. Anyone have any magic?

Memtest won't fix damaged RAM. (Boy would THAT be nice!). You may have a
scrambled disk but I doubt it. Since the system will boot OK if you slow
it down and go manually, I suspect the RAM is bad (or a bus chip is
damaged) and running it at full speed (i.e. let it try and load by it
self) may be overheating the problem area causing intermittent failures.

Memtest will tell you if the RAM is toast(ed). It the memtest is OK
check the heat sink on the CPU and make sure it is solid and feels warm
and that the cpu fan is spinning freely (I have cats and dogs so I have
fur-lined heat sinks and fans that choke on the stuff).

The fsck may have only checked a tiny /boot partition. This is the time
for a good boot floppy or bootable CD. Run fdisk -l to see what
partitions you have and then run fsck on all but the swap partition. You
can always rerun mkswap to reformat the swap space.

badblocks is another good tool to run. It can find and record the
location of, well, bad blocks on the hard drive and mark them as such so
they won't get used.

If you want to get under the hood and really tinker with the RAM
http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/download.html has a kernel patch
that allows the use of moderately damaged RAM in a working system. 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Barry Cisna
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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