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Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 20:14:45 +0200 (CEST)
From: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
To: Colin Brace <cb@lim.nl>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: server (partly) fails: hardware?
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> However, three times during the past few days, it has stop functioning. The
> WAN connection dies and I can no longer ssh into the box. However, I can
> still ping it, and I can still ssh from one LAN client to another via the
> FreeBSD box.

disk I/O hangs while everything else works.
check with smartmontools if your disk report problems, if not - check 
cables.


> IOW, it seems to be dying, but not freezing, if that makes any sense. Alas,
> there is nothing in /var/messages to indicate what happens. I don't think

because it can't write to disk.

> it is succumbing to excessive load; it has a 1.6 MHz Pentium IV, 512 MB
> RAM, rarely uses swap, and the load averages tend to be very light.

FreeBSD runs fine on pentium 90 with 16MB RAM (with slightly cutdown 
kernel), without changes on 32.