From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Nov 20 4:50:12 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C32B937B416 for ; Tue, 20 Nov 2001 04:50:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:49:50 +0000 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 166AL1-0003mg-00; Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:49:19 +0000 Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:49:18 +0000 (GMT) From: Jan Grant X-X-Sender: To: Anthony Atkielski Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: home pc use In-Reply-To: <006901c171c0$a9f5c3c0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Jan writes: > > > I understand you're also seeing odd nightly > > crashes, and all on a new machine. > > I had only one crash, a few days ago, during the night. > > > Have you tried swapping your memory out for > > somethine else, etc.? > > The likelihood of a hardware problem is far too low to justify such extreme > measures. Problems like this are almost invariably software bugs. If that was the case, then it would be repeatable. And if it was a fairly quiescent system that hung because of software trouble, then there are few interacting processes to look at. If there were only two things going on at night (seti@home and the periodic scripts) _and_ they've both been through the same stuff on a regular basis without a crash (and they don't interact, which they seem not to) then the evidence leans towards your conclusion (it's a software problem) being doubtful; this isn't cargo-cult stuff - the software in question is not mysterious, it's pretty transparent. -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk and Nostradamus never dreamed of the Church of the Accellerated Worm To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message