Re: Linux 2.4.18 occassionally freezes

[Paul Furness <paul.furness@vil.ite.mee.com>]

Apart from the kernel, have you updated all the other packages on the
systems? It's not just the kernel that needs to be updated; pretty much
everything gets updated over the course of a year or more. It seems more
likely to be the apps than the kernel; 2.4.18 is indeed the latest
stable, but which Red Hat version do you have? 2.4.18-10 is, I think,
the latest patch, but RH8.0 uses 2.4.18-14.
Also check your VMWare version - 3.2 is the latest.
  

I remember having many problems with RH7.1's stability, but when I moved
to 7.2 it fixed many of them (although others were introduced.) Applying
all the updates to 7.2 made it very much better. 7.3 seems pretty good
too. I'm currently trying out 8 on my workstation, but I had a number of
little problems with it because a number of key things work differently
in 8. 

You could experiment with upgrading one of the machines that's showing
problems to a later version of RedHat (I wouldn't go for 8 yet as it's
very new and although it seems really good, there may still be hidden
bugs).

Upgrading to 7.2 or even 7.3 should have very little impact on every day
usage because the changes are mostly bug-fixes etc, so even if you have
one machine at 7.3 and the rest at 7.1, it shouldn't generate too many
problems.

Paul.

On Thu, 2002-10-10 at 12:20, Urte Fürst wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> I'm experiencing strange system freezes occurring occassionally. I have
> > 20 machines (all DELL Precision 530 workstations) running RedHat 7.1
> plus an updated 2.4.18 kernel (latest stable AFAIK). There are slight
> differences in additional hardware: some of the machines have an
> internal
> CD burner. With those machines (containing an internal CDRW device) and
> especially when vmware is installed and used as well, I see the system
> freezing every now and then. I have difficulties figuring out the cause,
> as there are no messages in the system log which seem to point me in the
> right direction. I never had this behaviour so far with a
> non-CDRW-system.
> The freeze sometimes happens two or thress times within one week,
> afterwards
> the machine is just happily working for the next whole month.
> 
> What would be good way to catch and eliminate the problem? Should I try
> so run a kernel with debugging enabled? Or does anyone have similar
> problems
> and maybe some hints how to cope with it?
> 
> Many thanx in advance for any help!
> Kind regards,
> Urte
> 
> -- 
>                                                        \|/
>                                                        @ @
> ---------------------------------------------------oOO-(_)-OOo-------------
> 
> All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?
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-- 
Paul Furness

Systems Manager

2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.

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