[TriLUG] How would you diagnose "random" system hangs?

[Owen Berry]

On Sunday 06 May 2007 19:31, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> My home system has been freezing up at apparently random times -- usually
> when I'm at work, so I come home to a frozen machine that has to be
> cold-booted. How would you go about checking this out? I've let memtest86
> run continuously for 24 hours with no errors, so I don't think it's
> memory. I have the sensors reporting hourly to a log, and there are no
> temperature concerns (generally between 37 and 40C). There's nothing of
> interest in syslog that rings any bells to me. Any ideas?
>
> The machine is an ASUS A8N-E, nForce chipset, with an Athlon64 dual-core
> CPU and 4GB of RAM in it. It's running debian etch, but with a
> home-compiled kernel 2.6.20.7.

Try another kernel. I experienced the same symptoms on my work desktop -
random freezes with no apparent cause ... nothing in syslogs, and only
occurring every few weeks, which eliminated anything out of cron. As far
as I can tell, some of the latest Fedora kernels cause my system
problems. I switched back to an older kernel (2.6.19) and haven't had
the same problem again (so far). Can't prove it though.

Owen