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Re: Upgrading kernel



On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 01:44:17AM +0200, Jan Agermose wrote:
> I have been handed over the "control" of a debian server - 
> and of couse now it startes to misbehave... (and I know 
> nothing about debian - sad to say )
> 
> I does not really crash totally, as I can still ping the
> server - but looking at the server from the outside, this
> is really not much of a server :-)
> 
> After booting the system the log has one or even more entries
> like the bellow - some one said it might be a nvidia driver 
> problem?
> 
> I read that debian has an "apt-get upgrade" option, but 
> 
> * how safe is it to run this? Will I have a system ready to 
> boot and reuse or might I end up with a system, that has a 
> lot of stuff not working?
> 
> I would like to keep the upgrade to a minimum - the kernel 
> or modules or what is needed - but still its a one shut deal
> - I really need a server that will run afterwards :-) Is this
> possible? Is it safe to upgrade a kernel using apt-get (if 
> this is the way to do it anyways)

If it isn't working and you don't know why, blindly trying to upgrade
it is not a very good idea. You could end up with a right mess.

> Or does the log snipets below point to a different problem at all?
> 
> What is really the minimum updateing I need to do  - as Im affraid
> of doing to mush with a system that acually did do the job up until
> now! 
> 
> Can this problem be related to using all memory and staring to use
> the swap partition? At this time I stopped using swap in case this
> was true (Im desperat!)...

Well, off the top of my head I'd say you've got a memory problem, and
your increasingly heavy use of memory is showing it up. Testing for
this in a server is a bitch, because you have to take it down. On the
other hand, it sounds like maybe you could do with more memory anyway.
So it may be that all you need to do is take it down for long enough
to rip out all the existing memory and replace it with brand new
modules of greater capacity. You'll certainly solve the problem of not
having enough memory; you may cure the problem you've posted about as
well, and if not you've still saved the time it takes to do a full
memory test.

-- 
Pigeon

Be kind to pigeons
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