Replacing MOBO, memory, etc.

[Bill Doman]

I have a FreeBSD 4.8 Release box that serves as my organization's mail
server and also does some light Samba file serving.  It's a K6-2 500 and
I've wanted for a while to upgrade to an Athlon.  So to test, I built up a
similar box, pulled the hard drive and put it in the new chassis.  Ran fine
for a couple days.  So I then took the new chassis to my office, changed
/etc/rc.conf to reflect that the new chassis had a Linksys instead of 3COM
card, shut down the old and moved over the hard drive.  All seemed well at
first--mail being served, could SSH into the box, but it locked up hard
after about 3 minutes with the only recourse a power-off reboot.  Repeated
exactly the same behavior.

The other major diff in the new was a Nvidia TNT2 card--when I moved that to
the old box, along with the hard drive, the system ran fine (kept serving
mail, etc.), but the video output went blank.  I *was* able to SSH into it
and do a graceful shutdown.  After replacing the video card (old one is a S3
Trio 64, God help us all!), it seems healthy again.  I've got 586 and 686
support in the kernel.  Any ideas on a better way to do this?

TIA,  Bill Doman, Systems Admin, Hospice Austin