Fred, Steve, On Thursday 09 December 2004 06:32, Fred A. Miller wrote:
On Wed December 8 2004 5:09 pm, Dylan wrote:
On Wednesday 08 Dec 2004 21:56 pm, Peter B Van Campen wrote:
Hi Steven ,
Altho I've been away from IBM for 14 yrs, I'll venture that the phrase "Machine Check" is a very strong indication of a hardware problem.
"Machine Check" here is an Intel / Pentium thing, not an IBM thing.
The *same* fault on four separate machines at the same time?
Absolutely! If a chipset is bad or "marginal," it's very possible. Not that long ago, I tried getting 9.1 to run on all 10 of 10 Gateways. I was hesitant to even try it as I KNOW most of their systems are less than spec. I was right.......6 of 10 had the SAME problem - a chipset problem. EVEN XP didn't like them very much.
Occam's Razor, dude! It's more likely there was some network activity, perhaps a malformed (possibly even malicious) broadcast packet that triggered a kernel bug / vulnerability. There was just a kernel update to fix a vulnerability of this sort: E.g., from "SUSE Security Summary Report SUSE-SR:2004:003" from the 7th of this month: -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==- - kernel Several problems have been found in the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels: ... - Several overflow checks in the smbfs handling of both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 were found missing by Stefan Esser. This is tracked by the Mitre CVE Id CAN-2004-0883. -==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==-
Fred
Randall Schulz