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Date:      Thu, 14 Sep 2000 11:47:02 -0400
From:      "Jeays, Mike - SDD/DDS" <mike.jeays@statcan.ca>
To:        "'John Straiton'" <jks@clickcom.com>
Cc:        "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:    RE: Spontaneous Reboot problem
Message-ID:  <F2DCDE350C71D411A68900902715763B9F62D6@msxa4.itsd.statcan.ca>

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About the only thing you haven't replaced is the power supply.  Bad ones can
cause all sorts of hard-to-explain problems.  If you have a spare case with
a power supply, how about putting all the other bits in there - you seem to
have had lots of practice building machines recently, so it won't take too
long...

I had a machine recently that would work when all the bits were wired
together on a formica tabletop, with the disks balanced on books.  When
assembled in the case, it said there was a keyboard error, and wouldn't boot
- even with a known good keyboard. The fourth time I reassembled it, it
worked, and has been stable since.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Straiton [mailto:jks@clickcom.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2000 9:47 AM
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Spontaneous Reboot problem


I have a machine at home that is about to drive me nuts. For the last 6
months it's worked fine with one exception. I could not do a buildworld.
About midway through the attempts, I would get a kernel panic. Occationally
it would seem to do it if I was doing the occational packetsniffing. (then
again I only use the machine for a couple of things)  If I used the machine
for anything more than a nat gateway and a fileserver, this would have
bothered me more, but in this case it didn't.

*however*

About 3 days ago it started getting into the habit of panicing very
frequently, doing anything, or seemingly nothing sometimes. Samba operations
seem to be the absolute worst for forcing it into this error that causes the
reboot. Usually by clicking "Network Neighborhood" on a machine on the local
lan (Ethernet through a Cisco Cat2908) would cause about 4 copies of SMBD to
fire up and then about 10 seconds later cause this error:

"Integer divide while in kernel mode"

yadda...yadda...
Rebooting in 15 seconds...

After which the Windows machine would claim the network was unbrowseable.

Now, in my experience, panics in a -STABLE or -RELEASE branch are usually
hardware error, so I went to swapping out hardware. I swapped the K6-200 for
a Cyrix150+ i had laying around, and swapped the memory (128M Dimm for 4 16M
Simms). Still a problem, so I reseated all the cards in the machine. Still
broken, I took everything out and put a new motherboard with a k6-2-300
processor into a machine using 2 other 16M Dimms I had and then replaced the
video card with an identical spare I had. Still broken, I removed the
SoundBlaster ISA card and was now able to browse "Network Neighborhood"
without causing a panic and was able to buildworld (which I did). However I
*still* get these panics, just less frequently. Now before I swap out the
last 3 things left ( 2 NIC's and the Hard drive), I thought I'd get
suggestions from the list as to what might be going wrong so I don't have to
reinstall this machine..

I'd give a uname but the machine panics when I try to telnet or ssh to it so
from memory it's a 4.1-STABLE machine with a barely custom kernel.The mods
to GENERIC that I made were to add

options IPFILTER
options IPFILTER_LOG
options QUOTA
device pcm

and then recompile. The buildworld and kernel build were both done last
night from a CVS the day prior.

It currently is a K6-2-300 w/ Asus P(3?)B-A MB & 2 16M Dimms. 1 Intel NIC, 1
3Com NIC, Matrox Mystique & Maxtor 30GB HD. No CDRom.
It was a K6-200 w/ Asus TX97e & 1 128M Dimm, 1 Inet NIC, 1 3Com NIC,
SoundBlaster ISA (maybe a 64Value?) Matrox Mystique & Maxtor 30GB HD. Still
no CDROM (removed after install).

Any suggestions that would keep me from having to reinstall the machine (and
gigs worth of ports cause I like it ready for anything...) would be
appreciated.

John Straiton
ClickCom, Inc.
jks@clickcom.com
(704)365-9970x101



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