Server 'freezing'

[Carsten Milling]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 06:12:39PM -0000, Rob Brandt wrote:
> > I suspect my problem, as well as yours, is hard disk related.
> > I've ran TechTools from OS9 and everything is fine except for
> > the test it can't run: linux drive test.  The e2fsprogs suite,
> > which fsck is part of, has a utility called badblocks which
> > obviously checks your drive for bad blocks.  I have yet to try
> > it.  My system is a production
> > system so I'm a little leary about hosing the filesystem.
> 
> man badblocks advises that this command should be run through
> e2fsck  with the -c parameter, which I did.  On two tries, at
> (near?) identical places, I got "Segmentation Fault"s.  At which
> time it seems to have crashed.

I didn't follow this thread from the beginning. Did you already think
about checking the RAM? I faced similar symptoms on a x86 machine some
time ago: i.e. system freezing from time to time, applications
segfaulting unpredictably, and, after the inevitable unclean
shutdowns, I had problems with e2fsck too. Guess why ...  Segmentation
Faults. All problems were gone after removing two cheap memory sticks
(never figured out which one of these actually was corrupt).

Did you ever compile a kernel on your system? If this fails because
of segfaults, as it did in my case, this could be a further indication
of bad RAM.

Carsten Milling