[TriLUG] How would you diagnose "random" system hangs?

[Jim Ray]

One thing you could do to really quickly and cheaply tell if the problem is
hardware or software is to boot to a Knoppix or other live CD/DVD to see if
the problem recurs.

Do you have a UPS to eliminate brown outs as root cause?

Regards,
 
Jim
 
Jim Ray, President
Neuse River Networks
tel: 919-838-1672 cell: 919-606-1772
http://www.Neuse.Net
 
Connecting You to the World since 1997
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew
> Perrin
> Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 7:31 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: [TriLUG] How would you diagnose "random" system hangs?
> 
> My home system has been freezing up at apparently random times -- usually
> when I'm at work, so I come home to a frozen machine that has to be
> cold-booted. How would you go about checking this out? I've let memtest86
> run continuously for 24 hours with no errors, so I don't think it's
> memory. I have the sensors reporting hourly to a log, and there are no
> temperature concerns (generally between 37 and 40C). There's nothing of
> interest in syslog that rings any bells to me. Any ideas?
> 
> The machine is an ASUS A8N-E, nForce chipset, with an Athlon64 dual-core
> CPU and 4GB of RAM in it. It's running debian etch, but with a
> home-compiled kernel 2.6.20.7.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu -
http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
> Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
> New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl
> 
> 
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