George Borisov wrote:
Dougie Nisbet wrote:I'm not sure how to go about tracking this down. My searching of the archives shows that these symptoms could describe a faulty physical component, such as memory or PSU.That would be my suggestion as well. You should check that all of the fans in the machine are working. Some CPUs will reboot the machine if they get too hot. The first thing to try and swap out would be the PSU (as you said).
That's on my list of things to try. In fact, it's my next thing to try, but first I'm testing a theory....
I've had trouble with this machine before. It's a Supermicro 370DDE that I've had for several years and it's always been reliable. It's put up with some pretty hostile situations so, as Marty says, it's "only a matter of time" before something fails. However before I start swapping out hardware I want to test if this happens with a 2.4 kernel. A couple of years ago I tried to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.2 and suffered from occasional random crashes (not reboots). I never did get to the bottom of it and eventually reverted back to 2.4.27. http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/preston/2004-April/000855.html
At some point when I realised the 2.6 kernels had moved on a bit I decided to upgrade to 2.6.8 and have been running with that for a long time. I know it's not very scientific, but I'm going to try running a 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and see if the random reboots happen with both.
Dougie