Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 08:26:58 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "Joe Loughry" <loughry@qwest.net>, <henryammons@yahoo.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Intermittant freezing problems Message-ID: <012901c0a81e$e58ecc40$0200a8c0@apana.org.au> References: <200103082149.OAA19123@miranda.dnvr.uswest.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Without trying to start another religious war ..... I've had the odd lockup issue here & in every case an AMD K6 or Duron CPU was involved. Swapping the K6 for an Intel has always solved the problem for me ... the Durons have been put out to pasture (actually given to some brat to play moronic games) This may or not be totally conclusive, but its always worked so thats all thats been needed. If at some stage I strike a run of bad Intels (hasn't happened yet) I'll undoubtedly change my attitude, however I can't recall even one crook Intel (or even a Cyrix / IDT for that matter) . It seems that AMD followers are inclined to be a faithful breed so I expect several to start jumping up & down claiming they only have bad experiences with Intel .... looking around at the machines with expensive names thereon & presently marketed in OZ, it doesn't appear that AMD is highly regarded there. I don't mean the boy-wonder special Packard Bell disasters .... none of the top end server hardware I've seen from from HP / IBM / Compaq had the option of AMD (or anything except Intel for that matter). To be fair to AMD, if I was putting together a WinME box for playing mindless games I'd probably use an Athlon or whatever .... the things are well priced and apparently work properly with games. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Loughry" <loughry@qwest.net> To: <henryammons@yahoo.com>; <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 7:49 AM Subject: Re: Intermittant freezing problems > > I'm afraid I can't help with your problem directly, but I would like to > report something similar that has been happening to my 3.5-STABLE box > ever since it was a 3.2-RELEASE :) > > The problem manifests as unexpected freeze-ups, at random intervals, for > random amounts of time, usually several times a day. If left alone, the > system will eventually pick up where it left off as if nothing happened > (although the time-of-day clock will be wrong, because it stopped along > with everything else). EVERYTHING is frozen--the machine does not respond > to the console keyboard, tty ports, or pings. The syscons cursor stops > blinking. > > It does respond to the reset button, however. If I leave it alone long > enough, it comes out if this coma after anywhere from 10 seconds to more > than 14 hours. Time of occurrence and duration are random--I've graphed > them from data collected by another machine that continually pings the > troublesome host every 10 seconds to see if it is alive. > > Nearly every component except the motherboard and the IDE controller has > been replaced (the IDE controller is integrated into the motherboard). I > suppose I should try replacing that next. The machine is a Pentium Pro > 200 (underclocked to 150 MHz in an attempt to see if it was a heat-related > problem) with 128 MB of Kingston SIMM memory. Thinking it was a heat > issue, I monitored the CPU heatsink temperature with a thermocouple and > installed additional fans and ducting until the temperature stayed below > 30 celsius all the time. I turned off the distributed.net client because > I thought that might be the trouble. I turned off the syscons screen > saver. The machine doesn't run X, and the kernel has been configured to > include the minimum required by this hardware. Replacing the video card, > serial ports, Ethernet card, and processor all have not helped. There is > never an error message on the console or in the logs...and I can't get a > kernel debug trace because when it happens, the machine is completely > nonresponsive. > > It only happens on this one machine. I think I'm going to cure it by > installing a Pentium III, some DIMMs, a Fast Ethernet card, and a 50 GB > SCSI disk drive.... > > -Joe > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?012901c0a81e$e58ecc40$0200a8c0>