From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Aug 27 21:34:50 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from grumpy.dyndns.org (user-24-214-57-209.knology.net [24.214.57.209]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D143137B401 for ; Mon, 27 Aug 2001 21:34:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by grumpy.dyndns.org (8.11.3/8.11.4) with ESMTP id f7S4YZw91567; Mon, 27 Aug 2001 23:34:35 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org) Message-Id: <200108280434.f7S4YZw91567@grumpy.dyndns.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Tenebrae Cc: Alex Varju , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 4.4-rc instability In-Reply-To: Message from Tenebrae of "Mon, 27 Aug 2001 10:11:21 PDT." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 23:34:35 -0500 From: David Kelly Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Tenebrae writes: > > I had a similar problem back in May - bad memory. I replaced the cheap > ghetto RAM I had in there with some nice spiffy Micron RAM and my server > is now quite happy. I wish I had known about memtest before. It would > have saved me a lot of headaches and fdisks (and leaping from -RELEASE to > -STABLE when I didn't necessarily need to). > It's only an extra couple bucks these days to get a reliable brand of RAM > like Micron or Kingston. It's definitely worth it IMHO. And you only have to go thru an exercise like that once with non-parity memory and then once more with parity memory to become a believer in parity checked memory. Used to run an installation of about 40 machines, mixed SGI and Sun. Part of my weekly check was a scan for logged recovered memory errors. They simply happened sometimes to even healthy machines. But often when a machine started crashing or unusual process termination, I'd find several memory errors logged. When the machine is under a maintenance contract entries in the system log make it easy to have the soft memory replaced before the machine becomes unstable. My Asus A7V MB does not support parity/ECC. Am not happy that it doesn't. But I bought parity/ECC PC133 SDRAM for it because I've noticed I recycle memory and tape drives when retiring MB's and CPU's. Will heavily prefer something supporting ECC when the A7V is replaced. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message