Re: Computer instability under Debian Stable

[Nicolas Bercher <nbercher@yahoo.fr>]

On 03/07/2011 09:43, Adrian Levi wrote:
> My home server has been experiencing instability issues running Debian stable.
>
> My issue is I have no sound output and overnight the computer will
> hard lock-up so that the num-lock light won't even toggle.
> I updated to 2.6.38 thinking it might be a kernel compatibility issue
> but the problem remains.
> I downloaded and booted from an Ubuntu 11.04 CD and the system has
> been running stable over the last 5 something days.
>
> Ram has passed countless passes on Memtest86+, The CPU i'd have
> figured would have failed running any OS.
> Likewise the system is stable running Win 7 64bit.
>
> I have attached an lspci -vv and lsmod.
> I have a feeling that my issue might be Debians firmware stripped
> kernel but don't know where else to look for problems, dmesg dosen't
> seem to provide any hints.

So, before upgrading the kernel to 2.6.38, where you using the standard stable Debian 
kernel (2.6.32)?  If not (but seems yes), maybe downgrading the kernel back to the stable 
one is a good thing to test.

Maybe this is still a hardware issue (typically bad electrical contacts) you have 
temporarly disabled because of physical manipulations on the machine.  So, I encourage you 
to retry Debian and see how long the uptime can be.  Of course this test may require 
several days...

Another thing, have you see any kernel oops (Call Trace, etc.) in the logs?
Did you try to unload kernel modules you might have installed recently?

Nicolas