[Techtalk] machine hanging

[B Seeger]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 08:04 +0100, R. Daneel Olivaw wrote:

> CPU overload doesn't crash a machine.

> Low diskspace doesn't crash a machine neither.

Okay, good to know. 

> I would rather check Memory chips instead, there is no reason that an
> intense operation (scp is not that intense) or even heavy file
> manipulation (logrotate) would crash your machine.
> Instead, all the operations may use up more RAM, and failing to
> allocate memory for some kernel resources (like usb hotplug) may crash
> your system ...

The memory is PC2700 CL2.5 512 M sticks. I feel silly because I don't
really have more info then that and I don't know what the CP and CL
acronyms mean. :)

I have some 256M DDR 266 MHz CL2 ECC sticks (so 512 total) PC
2100U-20221-Z.  I've just swapped them in and tried to scp something off
the machine (a scenario, as earlier mentioned, that will hang the
machine).  It still hangs.  

Trouble is, I don't know if I've swapped in appropriate memory for this
machine.  Also don't know if I can just put in one stick (I'm used to
Supermicro motherboards where you generally need 2 sticks at a time --
standard?). 

The motherboard is an ASUS PC-DL 1.05
 http://www.ctechnet.com/hardware/Asus/PC-DL/asus_pcdl.htm

I've gotten some info from the above site about the memory - so I
*think* I'm okay, but... 

I'm going to see if I can get a knoppix live cd to work -- but in the
mean time, any thoughts on memory? (I'll report back about knoppix soon)

One more thing -- top tells me I have swap space (313M), but it's not
used at all - is that odd?  I just rebooted and ran top. Machine hung,
but at least I have some output from it... 

top - 16:06:10 up 4 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.19, 0.09
Tasks:  32 total,   1 running,  31 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   0.7% user,   2.6% system,   0.0% nice,  96.7% idle
Mem:    515324k total,    82008k used,   433316k free,     4048k buffers
Swap:   313256k total,        0k used,   313256k free,     7504k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+
COMMAND           
  352 root      17   0   968  968  792 R  0.0  0.2   0:00.01
top               
  349 root      17   0  1316 1316 1088 S  0.0  0.3   0:00.00
bash              
  347 root      14   0  1884 1880 1592 S  0.0  0.4   0:00.02
sshd              
  346 root      13   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  345 root      11   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  344 root      11   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  343 root      11   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  342 root      10   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  341 root       9   0   480  480  428 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
getty             
  335 root      11   0   332  328  280 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00
msgd              
  327 root      10   0   732  732  628 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.01
cron              
  324 root      10   0   772  772  680 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.00 rpc.statd 
..... 
   
Thanks for your help so far - I feel like I've been set down on a
strange planet with this machine.  (I'm used to much newer servers, so
this is probably a good learning lesson for me - okay, so this isn't
*that* old, but still...).

-Bethany