At the beginning.
However, some people suggest starting in the middle, and there's a small
but vocal breakaway sect that advocates starting at the end.
on Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 01:59:37PM +0200, Paul Frederiks (fred@phoenixstam.org) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> ATM my sid box is a mess.
Single specific problem reports are more resolveable than broad general
ones.
Usually and "everything is broken" problem is traceable to one or two
root causes. Work on identifying these.
> All Gecko based browsers stall or crash at least every hour. Mplayer
> crashes all the time.
This has changed since when? You had better results previously? What
have you done?
For a given app, 'strace foo 2>&1 | tee foo.strace' will generate a lot
of output, possibly indicating source of errors.
> Pan is slow,
In my case it's completely broken.
> openoffice is slow,
That's completely normal ;-)
> etc. etc. Shutdowns occasionally end up in a kernel panic.
This sounds like bad HW, bad drivers, or bad libs.
Read your system logs. Any messages or oddments there?
Run memtest86, from you bootloader, at least overnight. While this
rarely seems to find the root cause of a problem, it gets you out of our
hair for 12 hours (that's a joke, son), and eliminates an easily
identified culprit. If it fails, try running less of your memory using
the 'MEM=##M" boot option. If you've got one bad chip or DIMM, this can
identify which, sometimes, without your having to rip your case apart.
Read up on Sig11 errors. Try running your kernel under load (kernel
builds are the classic test) and see what happens.
Run with minimal drivers. Unload all but the bare minimum of modules
you need. See if this helps. Add 'em back in a few at a time. See how
things run. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Pull cards/peripherals from your system and see what's going on.
Get a stable Knoppix build or LNX-BBC and try using it to burn-in your
system. I'd suggest the latter as a stable release just came out and
it's got a ton of admin tools on it.
Check that you don't have bad disk, failing disk controllers, bad Mobo,
bad PCI bus....
> xterm and gnome-terminal sometimes don't respond to input for multiple
> seconds.
This can happen during normal circumstances with too little memory, too
much swap, or slow disks.
> Everything is just slow as hell.
> It seems connected with the fact that my broadband connection is bad
> ATM.
***HIGHLY*** unlikely. Unless you're doing something very odd over the
InterBahn.
> The dhcp server fails to assign the DSLAM as a gateway (like it always
> did), so I need to manually add the modem as a gateway (which restores
> a connection).
Sounds like a separate problem.
> Why should this totally wreck the whole system?
NFC.
> Suggestions how to fix this?
Yes: find the problem. Fix or remove the affected component.
Oh, and read this:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
And this:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Burn all gifs! Use PNG and tell Unisys to go to hell:
http://burnallgifs.org/
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