7.0 crashes

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Monday 17 March 2008, illoai at gmail.com wrote:
> On 16/03/2008, Firas Kraiem <firas at itsuki.fkraiem.org> wrote:
> > On Sunday 16 March 2008 20:43:03 illoai at gmail.com wrote:
> >  > On 16/03/2008, Firas Kraiem <firas at itsuki.fkraiem.org> wrote:
> >  > > Greetings
> >  > >
> >  > >  I have a 7.0 system (upgraded from 6.2 to 6.3 then to 7.0 using
> >  > >  freebsd-update) and I've experienced a few system crashes (the
> >  > > system just hard-reboots on it's own) that seem to happen when it
> >  > > is under heavy network load (downloading at several
> >  > > megabytes/second).
> >  > >
> >  > >  Nothing gets written in /var/log/messages when the crashes happen,
> >  > > and I'm a bit clueless about how to investigate the issue further,
> >  > > so ideas would be much appreciated.
> >  >
> >  > Lo, back in the days of fbsd4.1.1 (or thereabouts) a
> >  > similar problem had I: random crashes under network
> >  > load with no core files, no dumps, no errors.
> >  >
> >  > Try replacing your NIC.
> >
> > Thanks for your answer.
> >
> >  The NIC in question is a Realtek 8139 and indeed, Google told me that a
> >  few people have been experiencing similar issues with it. However, that
> >  was with old (4.x/5.x) FreeBSD releases, so I'm wondering: is this
> >  particular NIC model still causing problems or is it the NIC breaking
> >  in some way? The reason I ask is that the machine is a dedicated server
> >  over which I have no hardware control, so asking the provider to
> >  replace the NIC with another model could be a bit bothersome.
>
> I couldn't possibly say in your case, but in mine it was
> a 3com xl nic that had simply gone crackers.
>
> Any time I get weird, dumpless reboots I suspect hard-
> ware.  Or Thor.

One time I had this kind of trouble and although memtest didn't find any 
problems with the memory, replacing it still solved the problem. 

Hardware problems are really difficult to diagnose.

-- 
Pieter de Goeje