[vox-tech] RH keeps crashing

[Richard S. Crawford]

At 10:20 AM 4/22/02 -0700, you wrote:
>richard, at the risk of starting another "tom the bicyclist" thread, i
>would say that you need to pick up a general book on linux.

Hee hee.  I admit that I kind of panicked on this one.  I've heard that:

a.      The most common cause of a Linux crash is a hard drive problem... and
b.      Hard drives are difficult to replace by yourself.

Not being much of a hardware guy, and knowing the few facts that I knew, I 
kind of panicked.

I'm also not at home with the box right now.  I'm trying to log in 
remotely, and unable to do so (though I was able to just an hour ago)... 
there is simply no response from my computer.

I had some problems with Evolution last night, which I had traced to a 
problem with its mail folders.  I had tried killing Evolution and 
restarting it but that seemed to cause the system to crash.  I removed the 
Evolution RPM's and reinstalled them, and things seemed to go all right for 
a few hours, and then it crashed again.

Perhaps "crash" is not the technical term.  The system simply froze 
up.  The screensaver was on in the second case, but immobile (those ants 
were stuck on that moebius strip forever, not moving).  I couldn't figure 
out what else to do either time, so I simply pressed the "reset" button on 
the computer.  The computer rebooted, of course, and prompted me to run 
fsck each time, which I did.

Basic Linux books that I have: "Running Linux" and "Linux in a 
Nutshell".  Those two books (along with a couple of good search engines, a 
very patient brother-in-law, and an outstanding local support group) are 
usually more than adequate to help me figure out solutions.


[snippage]

>there is a program called memtest that you may want to run.  it checks
>out your ram by a series of very detailed, very thorough tests.

Thanks.  I'll do that when I get home this evening.


>i don't mean to sound harsh, but it seems like we get a "look at your
>log files" thread about every 1 or 2 weeks.  it would be beneficial to
>read other vox-tech traffic.

I didn't see it as harsh.  I used to participate on a couple of PHP and 
Perl-CGI lists.  I learned that there is sometimes not enough patience in 
the world to deal with questions like, "How can I use Perl (or PHP) to grey 
out the Back button in IE".

FWIW, asking a question like this is usually my last resort.   Usually I do 
a lot more research and scan archives... but, like I said, I panicked. ;-)


>just because you didn't ask the original question doesn't mean a) it
>doesn't apply to you and b) you can't join in on the discussion.
>
>
>pete

Thanks