Something rotten in the OS?

[Steve Warwick]

Hey All, 

I have just had my 2nd HD crash in a year - different machine, different
type of drive etc - the only consistency is the OS and the installed
software.

It looks like this is some kind of overflow????

This problem seems to start after about a month and is indicated by there
being fragments of the kernel config data in the daily kernel log messages.
I asked about that on this list but people seemed to think it was just some
kind of log rotation.

I caught the machine a couple of months ago with nearly all the swap used
(800meg out of 1 gig) and rebooted which kept the machine happy.

I recently noticed the kernel log messages had the config fragments again
and was going to to a reboot - but alas too late. The machine is down, HD is
damaged and we are trying to get data off the drive...

This is exactly the problem that occurred 6 months ago. That time I put it
down to lousy overheated hosting but now I don't have that excuse.

Has anyone seen this before?

Does FreeBSD have to be re-booted every month for safety?

Should I give up and use Linux?



A frustrated sysadmin


Steve