kernel panics, lots of them

[Chuck Swiger]

jaime at snowmoon.com wrote:
> 	I have a box that has been having problems for months.
> Originally, there were problems that were corrected by replacing the
> mother board.

What kind of problems did you have?  And what hardware?  It's quite 
possible to damage the CPU or even the power supply if the motherboard 
fails badly enough.

 > Since then, and I'm not sure when this began, there have
> been kernel panics after several days of uptime.  They can be after one
> day or three weeks, but they keep happening.

Probably not a problem with cooling, then.
Still sounds like flaky hardware, though, to me...

> 	So far, I've replaced an IDE cable and a boot time error
> disappeared, replaced RAM with no benefits, and cvsup'ed/make-world'ed
> with no benefits.
> 
> 	I'm not sure what is causing the problems.  Any suggestions of
> what I should do next?  I still have 14 kernel panic dumps if anyone can
> think of tests that I should be running.  Most of the panics appear to be
> page faults, but two of them were lockmgr issues.  I'm considering
> replacing the mother board and/or the whole computer.  Unfortunately, this
> is a fairly major server at my school (staff email, assorted web-based
> apps, web site, intranet, etc.) so I am trying to keep outage frequency
> and duration to a minimum.

There is memtest and cpuburn in the ports; try running those and see 
whether you can get the system to crash.

-Chuck