[mythtv-users] OT. Howto diagnose machine dying/crashing

[Yeechang Lee]

Mark <mark at ripitup.ca> says:
> About every week or 10 days, this box just up and dies.  No /var/log/messages 
> entries ( you just see the reboot ), nothing on the screen etc...

[...]

> It does seem to be load related because I have reproduced it once by
> transfering a hundred or so gigs of data into it and it died then.
> FC5, mdadm raid..

Other than FC5, this sounds *exactly* like what I faced with an
eight-drive FC3 system using mdadm RAID 5; see
<URL:https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=167173>. Was
the kernel stack issue not resolved in FC5?

The other thing that comes to mind is the power supply. Is it a brand
name or a $39 wonder? 410W is plenty, but so are four RAID drives plus
a boot drive and perhaps an optical drive, and cheap power supplies
are notorious for buckling under strain. That aforementioned RAID
server is currently out of commission due to random hangs (after a few
minutes or hours, formerly 10-14 days); I think the (Antec, thus
quality) 550W drive is responsible, and haven't gotten around to
replace it with another (Antec) supply yet.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US