[PLUG] system instability solved (I think)

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

I've posted several requests for help in understanding some
instability I've been seeing on my new machine.  I think it's stable
now.  I wanted to share what happened.  In brief, while the problem
surely started with a kernel / motherboard incompatibility, I believe
I had a buggy library.  Upgrading that library may have fixed the
problem.

By way of history, I first saw some kernel messages that indicated I
should run with nopnpbios, noapic, and acpi=no.  That helped some but
didn't fix the problem.  Running memtest for several hours didn't
reveal anything.

A suspicious item was that I was not seeing any signs of crashes
happening uniformly over apps.  For example, daemons did not appear to
be disappearing.  I would expect this if the hardware or kernel were
flaky.

After two weeks I began to find unlikely that apt-get update hadn't
caused anything new to install on dist-upgrade.  My apt/sources.list
had originally only checked rutgers and security:

   deb ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/debian/ testing main
   deb-src ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/debian/ testing main

   deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main

I added debian.org:

   deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main  
   deb-src ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main  
   deb ftp://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main
   deb-src ftp://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main

With that change a large number of packages were available for
upgrade.  That upgrade apparently fixed the problems.  In any case, in
the last three days, I have had no crashes, which is a very good sign.
(I had been seeing several a day.)

Thanks again to everyone on the list for their help.  These sorts of
problems are very frustrating: it's extremely helpful and comforting
to have helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable folks to ask for help
(and, I'm sorry, sometimes to whine to in frustration).

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>    +1 215/837-2287
 GPG fingerprint: 1A1A BA95 D082 A558 A276  63C6 16BF 8C4C 0D1D AE4B

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