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Date:      Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:03:26 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "T.S. Waterman" <waterman@cs.brandeis.edu>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        waterman@berry.cs.brandeis.edu (T.S. Waterman)
Subject:   random system hang -- FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELASE
Message-ID:  <199808272203.SAA14411@rasp.cs.brandeis.edu>

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I installed 2.2.7-RELEASE at the beginning of August.
I like it -- it's great.  BUT, I've been having random
system crashes since the installation. This isn't good,
since I'm actually trying to get some work done here.

Anybody have a clue or seen behavior like this?
Are there any known hardware problems that might be
causing this?

symptoms:  
system hangs. No panic. No core dump.
completely unresponsive to keyboard, mouse, network, etc.
If the disk (IDE) was selected, it stays selected (r/w/ light
stays on).
  Uptimes generally ~3-6 hours (seems to be getting shorter)
with min=1hour, max=6 days (of heavy use, even)
  It seems (completely subjectively) to happen during high IP traffic
and high disk-traffic times. but don't trust this observation:)
  Generally, everything is fine on reboot, but it once died
in the middle of vipw, leaving me a mangled pwd database. That was fun.

Attempted solutions: 

Re-seat the processor & memory :)  Didn't help.
Rebuilt the kernel a few times, trying to remove all
unused devices and options. No noticable effect.
Removed all but the video card, and all the associated device drivers.
No effect.
   Adding the DDB option to the kernel didn't ever break me out to
the debugger, either.
  I'm working on scrounging the cables for a serial console,
but I doubt this will give me any more information.

I'm also planning on going to 2.2-STABLE, which may have
some bugs ironed out (but I can't figure out how to get a report
of mods/updates between dates or releases, even. The 
www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi queries can only get me this stuff
for individual files.  Can't I get CVS commit messages for a whole
sub-tree?)


The machine passes all startup hardware & memory tests, for what
that's worth.


Machine configuration:
OS:  FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELEASE
M/B:  ASUS P2L97 (440LX chipset)  (w/ the lates BIOS version)
PII 300MHz
128Mb 10ns sdram
IBM 8.4G IDE hard drive  (FreeBSD on slice 2, 6Gb)
generic S3-Virge video
Soundblaster AWE64
Rockwell Kflex 56K modem
3Com 900  ethernet


Thanks for any info you might have.
-- 
--ts		waterman@cs.brandeis.edu


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