System Still Freezing

[Ken Stevenson]

Grant Peel wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Another chapter in the life (and death), of my Dell PE 1850.
> 
> As you may be aware, I have a PE 1850 that has started to intermitantly 
> freeze (this all started Feb 23rd). SOmetimes, it will run for 2 days, 
> then freeze, sometimes it can run as long as 5 days.
> 
> All logs and everything turned up to near debug, show nothing. The 
> system just stops dead, and again, a physical suyvey of the server 
> reveals nothing. All lights still working and blinking, no excessive 
> heat not beeps etc etc.
> 
> A week ago, I ran every 32 bit Dell diagnostic I could on it ... for 4 
> hours straight and not 1 error found. I also ran memetst86 for 3 hours 
> and no errors found.
> 

I don't have an answer for you, but I had a very similar problem. It's 
why I'm running FreeBSD now. I had RedHat 9 installed on a Dell 2650 
running Apache 2, Postfix, Postgresql, Bind ... My system has a DRAC, 
raid, and a single processor. Actually I have 2 identical servers. One 
server is only for backup and lightly used and it never had a problem.

The symptoms on my primary server were exactly the same. Sometimes it 
would seize up twice in one week. Sometimes it would run for weeks. 
The weird thing was that it would respond to pings. However no system 
services responded and the console was totally unresponsive.

In frustration after not being able to figure out what was causing the 
problem, I decided to try FreeBSD 6 Stable. End of problem. I never 
figured out if it was the operating system, or an application or what.

If you're desperate, you might want to try the opposite: load Linux. 
If you're looking for something that feels familiar to a FreeBSD'er, 
try Gentoo.


-- 
Ken Stevenson
Allen-Myland Inc.