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Re: totally crashed workstation



On 12/09/08 08:40, Jussi Nurminen wrote:

Hi,
when burning a DVD today, our new Debian workstation suddenly froze. I could
move the mouse cursor, but the system did not respond to any keypresses
(even magic sysrq). I could not ssh to the box and it did not even respond
to ping.
With no other options, I powered it down and back up again, and it come up
nicely. None of the logfiles show nothing interesting, at some point the
logging just stops.

How can I investigate this further? I already burned and erased a DVD-RW
dozens of times in a loop without a problem. Currently I'm running
memtest86. I suspect some kind of hardware problem, because our other Debian
workstations have never done this kind of thing.

The machine is a Dell Precision 690 with 2 dual-core Xeon processors, 4 GiB
of memory and two SAS hard drives, running Debian Lenny.

I've experienced these same symptoms (when simply surfing the web, when my system is under a heavy memory load, not when burning a DVD) in Unstable, running 2.6.2[0-4] kernels, but, like you, haven't been able to find a cause. Hasn't happened with 2.6.2[567] kernels, yet. Of course, the kernel might have nothing to do with the error...

My suspicion, though, has been memory overcommit issues, since I have this in my /etc/sysctl.conf :

vm.overcommit_memory = 2

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

How does being physically handicapped make me Differently-Abled?
What different abilities do I have?


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