A Weird Problem

[Tony Hammitt]

This sounds like a hardware problem.

You may have a bad memory board.  Older machines eventually start
to have uncorrectable memory errors and most old machines don't
even have error correcting memory.  Or you could have some bad
blocks in the swap area on the disk.

Try reformatting your swap:

swapoff /dev/<whatever>
mkswap -c /dev/<whatever>
swapon /dev/<whatever>

(mkswap -c checks for bad blocks)

If that doesn't help try to find replacement memory.  It probaby
takes 72 pin EDO or FPM memory if it's only 100MHz.  Get error
correcting if you do replace it.  No server should be without ECC
RAM.  If the bad block count is > 1, replace the hard drive.
If neither help, take the new parts out and put them in a new
machine, which you could probably buy for $300.

This is for work, right?

HTH,

	Tony

jose sanchez wrote:
> 
> Hi all:
> 
> I am currently running RH 6.2 on an old 100Mhz box.
> I've had come accross some weird problems. The box
> tends to lock up once in a while. I thought it was ok
> (I'm so use to this with my Win machine). Now it has
> started to worry me. I am running a DHCP server for
> our network at work, due to this problem our network
> has become affected.
> 
> I never turn this machine off. Sometimes I've come to
> work and no one can get on the network. I check this
> machine and there is so much stuff on the screen: A
> lot of Hex addresses... The last three lines, which
> are the only readable ones, read as follow:
> 
> Aiee, killing interrupt handler
> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill idle task!
> In Swapper task - not syncing
> 
> I don't know what all this means. I'm suspecting
> something's wrong in the kernel trying to wakeup some
> IRQs. Linux hasn't been that reliable to me. I don't
> know if I'm configuring things wrong or what. Just
> know, this is way above my head.
> 
> Please help. Thanks.
> 
> Kernel version: 2.2.14-5.0
> 
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