crashing linux

ray I keep log books of my machines.

I have had three machines: in 1996, a 166MHz Pentium machine which started out with 32Meg RAM and Windows 95 that crashed several times a day until I got a lot of their updates. I still got about 3 blue screens of rest a week. But applications crashed many times a day. After a lot of work, I determined I was not having hardware problems. I stuck Red Hat Linux 5.0 on it and it crashed much less. In fact, most of the crashing was in X Window System, not the kernel that continued to run. I upgraded the Linux on there to Red Hat Linux 6.0 and later to RHL 7.3. Along the line, that machine got its memory increased to 256 MBytes. I do ot have the logbook for that one.

In March 2000 I got a dual 550MHz Pentiun III machine with 512MBytes of RAM that came with RHL 6.0, upgraded to RHL 6.2, and RHL 7.3, running locked up May 11 (and I did not have the LAN working, so I could not kill it), but I could tell the kernel was still running (occasional disk IO). May 15, same thing. June 26, same thing. October 24: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. November 22: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. January 3, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. January 7; Installed VA Linux Systems version of Red Hat Linux 6.2. January 7, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. May 22, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. May 30, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. June 6, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. July 31, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. August 7, 2001: kernel crashed when modem trying to dial out. September 19, 2001: kernel crashed when trying to hang up modem. January 16, 2002: kernel crashed twice same day when trying to hang up modem. Jan 21, 2002: X Window System crashed, but kernel OK. April 1, 2002: X Window System crashed, but kernel OK. Mid June, 2002: Installed new distribution (RHL 7.3, I think) September 12, 2002: crashed. March 3, 2003: crashed. June 17, 2003: crashed. Never crashed after that.

In about March 2004, I put this machine together. Dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors, 4 GBytes RAM, etc. I have run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 ES on it ever since, 24-7 except when the power company has let me down. I reboot it only when the power is off for over an hour and my UPS poops out, or when I install a new kernel. Most recently, I rebooted it to run memtest86 because some program (I forget which) was flakey and people suggested a marginal memory. Memory was fine and I never found out what the trouble was. As far as I can tell, this machine has never crashed.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 13:25:00 up 80 days, 7:21, 3 users, load average: 4.47, 4.29, 4.19