I'll answer below. Since the system refused to stay up, I installed an older kernel verion of Debian, which seems to be stable. But I'd much rather be using the SUSE distribution. See below for the continued blow by blow commentary. Laszlo On Sun, 31 May 1998, Wolfgang Weisselberg wrote:
Hi!
Trying to kill the keyboard, laszlo@idt.net produced:
I'm getting a very regular General Protection error, on the following system ( set up to be a mail and www server runing X ). I've reformated and reinstalled twice, with more limited package selection each time. No difference was noted.
[...]
After every few hours, the system gets semi locked. It responds to <alt><Function key> commands, but not to <cntrl><alt><del>. <enter> at any screen, except login prompt gives the following.
general protection error: 0000 cpu : 0 eip : 0010:[<00124c207>]
Are the numbers the same every time or do they cange? Did you compile this kernel?
What does /var/log/messages say about the crashes?
Did the crashes happen around the same time after switching the computer on? Shorter on warm days or with the sun shining on your computer chassis? If yes, it really looks like a heat problem.
The case is located directly in the path of the air conditioner. And the system crashed repeated at night. There seems to enough air circulation since I had a secondary cooling fan installed on the system.
Is your processor cooled properly? Does it's cooling fan turn without squeaky/grinding/etc noises? Does the power supply's fans turn OK?
All fans working, actually the power supply vents are the coolest of any or the many systems running here.
Try it with an open chassis (and some extra ventilators, probably houshold ones ... you *must* ensure a good circulation!), if that helps, it's a heat problem. Also at the time of the crash find out how hot the CPU is (the Cooler may probably not be attached properly). There are stripes aviable that change colour with temperature, they often give good indications.
I will run it with an open case, Since installing the network card, prior to the OS. The case has been on.
Are you 110ure your memory chip(s) is/are OK (no, works under Win does not count, Windows does not use the memory to the full potential)? Try with one half of the chips if possible, or with (a) completely different one(s).
Machine never had windows on it, but the memory seems fine running the debian distributuion. It has been up for almost 20 hours now.
Read /usr/src/linux/Documentation/oops-tracing.txt on how to report this crash.
Going off to RTM.
Reinstalling won't solve many problems under Linux and often does not pay, and *this* is definitely not a problem with packages. It's either the kernel or more probably a hardware problem ...
-Wolfgang
-- PGP 2 welcome: Mail me, subject "send PGP-key". If you've nothing at all to hide, you must be boring. Unsolicited Bulk E-Mails: *You* pay for ads you never wanted. Is our economy _so_ weak we have to tolerate SPAMMERS? I guess not. -- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e
-- To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e