[luau] locking server

[MonMotha]

R. Scott Belford wrote:
> Thanks for the quick suggestions
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 12:11 PM, MonMotha wrote:
> 
>> A great thing to do would be run memtest86 on the system, especially 
>> if you have thigns randomly segfaulting.  Bad memory can be a tricky 
>> thing to spot and diagnose.
> 
> 
> I gave it about 4 days of this before coming online.  Should I have 
> perhaps run it longer, maybe a month, or do you think that the test 
> would uncover bad memory within a few days?
> 

What tests did you run?  If you did the "all tests" (I think there's 12 
of them), the last test is VERY thourough and should catch any memory 
errors on the first go-around.  Barring that, it never hurts to run it 
longer, but likely the ram is good if it can pass all the memtest86 tests.

>>
>> Another thing that happened to someone recently was the motherboard 
>> not setting the voltage correctlty with AUTO.  Forcing the voltage to 
>> that in the spec sheets fixed his problems.
> 
> 
> This will be investigated.  It seems like I couldn't get 30 days with 
> bad voltage, but, perhaps this ultimately leads to suggestion 3, thermal 
> shutdown.  I'll check.

What processor is this again?  The Pentium 3 thermal shutdown is to 
simply execute the HLT instruction, which would be like a hard lock, 
though I believe it does throw an MCE jsut before that, which would 
cause a kernel panic if MCE is enabled.

> 
>>
>> This definately sounds like a hardware issue (possibly thermal 
>> shutdown?).  Normally the kernel manages to at least throw up an Oops 
>> on hardware failure, but occasionally hard locks are the result.  If 
>> you can find something that reliably triggers the problem, you can go 
>> a great way to diagnosing the cause.  Another possibility if it is 
>> software is a problem in an interrupt handler or some other situation 
>> where the kernel can't be interrupted but control is never returned to 
>> the kernel by a driver.
> 
> 
> I have theorized that my realtek ethernet chipset may be substandard for 
> this application.  A freebsd friend pointed out that the author of the 
> realtek driver for Freebsd made a few very negative comments about the 
> quality of the chipset in his man pages.  He makes these two comments:

snip comments re: realtek

> 
> The rl driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul at ctr.columbia.edu>.
> 
> In your opinion, could this lead to a lock-down, and does realtek have 
> that bad of a reputation in the Linux community?  It sounds pretty bad 
> to me.

The Linux community isn't usaully as in tune with the hardware gurus 
(other than the driver developers themselves), but I have seen a few 
gripes about the quality of the spec sheets (and the chip in general) of 
the realtek 8139.  However, I've used those cards without incident for 
years, acheiving uptimes of many months (power outages...).  However, 
depending on the application, you might want a nicer card like a 3Com 3c905.

> 
> thanks again for your thoughts
> 
> scott

Not a problem.

--MonMotha
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