Instable machine; hardware or not?

[Ronald Paul]

Hello group,

I have a small server (AMD XP 2400+, ASRock K7VM4+lan, no ECC) running 
4.9-RELEASE since February 2004. It is being used for some small dynamic 
websites (FAMP), e-mail and some other small stuff. It got an uptime of 
400+ days last year but since a few months, the machines seems to get 
more and more unstable.

Seemingly random signals (most of them 11, some 10 and 6) are causing 
random processes (including bash, cron, named, adjkernts, inetd, syslogd 
and sh) to exit. So this cannot be something else than faulty hardware, 
you would think. But, and this is the strange part for me, these 
instabilities are somehow triggered because when the machine is 
restarted, the server seems rock-solid for the first week. I then can 
compile a kernel without problems.

Temperatures and voltages are fine:
> # healthd -d
> Temp.= 38.0, 21.5,  0.0; Rot.= 3629,    0,    0
>  Vcore = 1.73, 0.00; Volt. = 3.28, 4.95, 11.55, -10.55, -4.56

I already swapped memory and disk but this behavior keeps the same. Is 
there any possibility that this crashes would disappear when switching 
to 6.1-RELEASE or are these problems solely caused by hardware? If so, 
is there any indication on to what hardware-component I should look? I'm 
planning to switch motherboards but since it is quite a drive to our 
co-location facility and because it is still functioning as 
production-server and we do not have much failsafe-services yet, I want 
to think twice.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet,
Ronald Paul