FreeBSD 7.0 reboots on Dell 2950

[Mel]

On Wednesday 28 January 2009 13:24:59 Kirk Strauser wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2009, at 3:45 PM, Mel wrote:
> > On Wednesday 28 January 2009 11:24:50 Kirk Strauser wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 27 January 2009 10:32:57 Mel wrote:
> >>> Even though 7.1 has bugfixes, this kind of guesswork causes a lot of
> >>> downtime for OP without any certainty that things will be any
> >>> better.
> >>
> >> If by "lots" you mean "2 minutes for a reboot", I'd be inclined to
> >> agree.
> >
> > Right, you really want to do buildworld on a production machine that
> > experiences random reboots.
>
> That would make the situation worse how?  The worst case is that it
> fails during installkernel, leaving him to boot from kernel.old.

The worst case is 1 to N random reboots during buildworld (been there, done 
that), leaving the filesystem inconsistent, needing an fsck -y, unless you 
trust background_fsck, then finding out it's the hardware, not the OS.
It's easy to find out if the OS panics, by enabling crash dumps. Then you can 
still decide whether an upgrade might fix it and you may even get a clue as 
to which hardware or kernel subsystem is affected, if the kernel dumps.

I've had a machine where I never got buildworld to finish, tried 4 or 5 times 
hoping to get lucky this time...

Reapplying thermal paste to the CPU heatsink made everything work.
-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.