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Date:      Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:31:14 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, andreas@klemm.gtn.com, terry@lambert.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 2.2.1R NFS and FTP load problem FOUND
Message-ID:  <199704110201.LAA08278@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970410091311.006a8f8c@etinc.com> from dennis at "Apr 10, 97 09:13:13 am"

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dennis stands accused of saying:
> >> 
> >> BSDI comes with a RAM tester as add on utiliy on the BSDI CD.
> >> YOu can dd floppy image to floppy, boot from that floppy ...
> >
> >I tested a pile of RAM testers here at one stage while I was having a
> >running brawl with our then-RAM supplier about some memory I knew was
> >faulty.
> >
> >I didn't find a single one that would tell me the memory was busted,
> >but it most certainly was.  (They eventually relented, stuck it on
> >their tester, said "oh, well it is actually stuffed" and replaced it.
> >We shop elsewhere now.)
> 
> Blaming "bad ram" is like the doctor telling you you "have a virus" when he
> has no clue what else to tell you.......

... despite the fact that he's right (most people have several viral
infections at any given point in time), and that if you're down it's
the best thing he can tell you anyway.  If you want to argue about
this, I can redirect you at my SO (biotech) who will happily talk you
to death on the topic 8)

> If you have real bad ram (a dead pin or a bad location(s)), you get
> consistent failures that go away when you replace the ram or use
> another machine. If you have "flakey" ram (bad timing, etc) you get
> random failures and crashes. f you get the same failure on 2
> machines with different ram it ain't the ram.....

That's lousy logic there Dennis, and you ought to know that.  Matter of
fact, the bad RAM I was talking about before was in a group of four 
machines, and all four were displaying RAM-like failures.  Oddly,
replacing the RAM cured the problems.

> db

In your particular case, I don't buy the 'bad RAM' problem though.
Have you considered putting a 'vmstat' binary on the NFS partition
that you are loading from, and running 'vmstat -m' from the
holographic shell while the install is going?  Without this sort of
detail, it's impossible to tell what's going on - I can't reproduce
your problems; I did an 'everything' install last night using NFS onto
an 8M 486 (using a locally cut 2.2-STABLE release) and it worked fine.

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@gsoft.com.au             [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@gsoft.com.au            [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile)     0411-222-496   [[
]] realtime instrument control.         (ph)          +61-8-8267-3493   [[
]] Unix hardware collector.             "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick  [[



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