On 1/5/06, Carl Hartung <suselinux@cehartung.com> wrote:
On Thursday 05 January 2006 18:10, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Other diagnostic suggestions welcome.
Hi Greg,
Seems to me you've got things pretty well covered, especially with all those spares you have available for swapping out.
One more idea: If you check the BIOS, sometimes they have a range of 'default' configurations built in like "sedate; works with junk hardware" to "stable with brand name parts" to "you're nuts if you try this" ... sometimes you can step the memory CAS setting down from 2 or 2.5 to 3 or 3.5.
Those RAM tests are great for detecting outright faults and even some marginal regions in the chips and PCBs, but they don't even come close to simulating all the noise generated when the real OS is running.
Also, I seem to recall writing a fairly lengthy explanation here some weeks ago about why you cannot skimp on memory and why you're better off, especially with high end machines, paying the premium for name brand memory carrying a no questions asked 24 hour advance replacement warranty. Those pieces have usually been properly stress tested at the factory to confirm tight adherence to the stated performance characteristics. They're also usually labeled and sold in true matched sets.
regards,
- Carl
Thanks, I just finished moving my disk drives / controllers (3ware) to the new chassis. Everything else is new/different. Unfortunately it turns out to be a desktop MB I had, not a server MB. (ie. no ECC RAM on the new MB.) OTOH the spare chassis has redundant power-supplies, so I should be good to go for power. This chassis/power supply was fairly expensive so I can't use it for devel/test, but once I have a know good setup I can start swapping in the other set of components one at a time until this machine fails. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century