Re: debian crashes server (can't use debian ? :-( )
Benedict Verheyen said:
> Sometime it doesn't. It just shuts down as if you would unplug the power.
this is an indication of a SEVERE hardware problem. Possibly bad
cpu, bad ram, bad motherboard.
whatever it is though, it sounds to be at the core of the system and
not the fault of some driver or flakey SCSI card or whatever.
possible the ide controller is bad, or maybe there is a short in
the system, can be almost anything really, but this kind of shutdown
I've never seen it caused by software. Perhaps something is generating
a surge in the system and the power supply is cutting out..
> Software:
software at this point isn't really important, your description
of the crash is good enough for myself to determine at least that
I can't imagine how any software could cause that problem.
> Hardware:
> * AHA 2940 PCI SCSI adapter
> * ISA SB AWE64
> * Guillemot maxtor gamer 32 MB (was in my desktop a while ago
> but i wanted a faster card so i "upgraded" my server :-)
> * 2 PCI Realtek rtl8139 network cards
> * Maxtor 6 GB IDE harddisk (ext3 partitions)
> * 160 MB EDO Ram
> * Motherboard: DFI 686IPK (Intel 440FX chipset. Supports Intel
> Pentium II CPU up to 266 MHz. 4xPCI, 4xISA (1 shared) ,
> 4 x SIMM sockets.)
Intel 440FX, wow thats old! Same chipset as some of the first
pentium pro chips. I wouldn't be suprised if the board is
at fault. Have you tried lowering the amount of ram? going with
the minimum you have(say 16MB or something). Try different ram
combonations. But even then I don't think it will help. The
problem is elswhere, probably on the motherboard.
> Only thing i haven't changed yet is my guillemot graphics card.
> Could a graphics card result in crashes while it's only used
> when displaying console messages? Maybe it overheats?
what chipset is on the card? I remember reading a while back about
how some Nvidia chipsets draw too much power for some older AGP
slots. Even though you have PCI only, if the card is a high powered
video card it may be drawing more power then the board can take.
In 3D graphics your bottleneck will be the CPU, theres not much
point in putting a modern video card in such an old system, the
cpu won't be able to feed the card fast enough to take advantage
of it. A overheating video card wouldn't cause the system to
shut down I don't think. I've had video cards overheat and for me
at least it either locked up the system, or rebooted it(hard reboot),
but didn't power down.
> Interesting. I will try to test the memory too.
> You mention memtest386. Are there any other tools to test the system?
there is CPUBurn, which comes with a few tools, I don't think it's
available in debian but its available, run a search on google or
freshmeat. CPUBurn also comes with a chipset testing utility and
a memory testing utility. For disks, I use bonnie++. Running that
in a loop for a few days can produce a good amount of wear on a disk.
> Anyway, thanks for the pointers.
> (again, since you answered my very first posts about this problem too :-)
no problem! good luck
nate
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