Re: larry

[David Pastern <david@scsenterprises.com.au>]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 19:56 -0600, Mr Mike wrote:
> On Friday 25 February 2005 07:03 pm, Jean-David wrote:
> > --- Macskasi Csaba <bitumen@tuxworld.homelinux.org>
> >
> > wrote:
> > > On Friday 25 February 2005 02.36, Lawrence Vaughan
> > >
> > > wrote:
> > > > i am getting crashes and freezing up what can i do
> > >
> > > .
> > >
> > > "rm -rf /" is what you are searching for. aaghhh...
> >
> > u shuddn t listen to this guy
> >
> >
> 
> well....  if he can't provide any more information than 'my system hangs and 
> crahes' after being asked to provide more info,  then this could be the 
> solution to all his problems...  

That's an incredibly rude response.  A few helpful guiding comments to
the user was all that was needed.  

Macskasi:

What kernel are you running?  Try:

uname -a 

from the command line.  

What applications are you running?  Try checking (again, from a command
line):

top

this will list the currently running processes in real time, how much
ram/cpu they are using etc.

also:

ps aux

will showing the running list of processes.  

How much ram do you have? Try:

cat /proc/meminfo

For starters...just to see if something is freezing etc.  You may have a
cron job for apache or postgresql running in the background without
realising it.  Of course, it could be a system that's been borked (ie
ruined) due to incomplete apt updates, missing packages, dependency
issues etc.  Or it could be a hardware issue - cpu, ram or hard drive.

I'd suggest (if needed) checking that your hard drive has dma turned on.
You can check via (as root):

hdparm /dev/hd*

where * is whatever hard drive your using, ie /dev/hda.  If your hard
drive uses dma, then it should be turned on, and should show a line
like:

using_dma    =  1 (on)

You may want to apt-get this package to test the ram:

memtest86

and run tests on the ram.  Faulty ram can cause this sort of problem as
well.

Do you have another operating system on this drive?  If so, does it also
run unstable or crash (ignore the usual Windows behave here lol).  A
improperly cooled cpu can overheat and cause random crashes and
freezes.  

As others have posted, you haven't given a lot of information, which
makes diagnosing things rather hard.  

Dave

PS You could always hop over to www.libranet.com and try Libranet ;-)


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