On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Ward William E PHDN wrote:
> A lot of folks, such as Nate here, have been saying that Linux rarely
> crashes.
I was going to comment that Linux does crash, you beat me to it. Over the
years I've found 3 things that usually the cause of a crash (not including
fork bombs and stuff like that. Linux can seem dead if it is really really
busy, but if one is patient one can usually fix the problem).
1. XFree86 - Nothing kills a machine faster than buggy video drivers.
Sometimes only the display gets wacked and one can telnet in and reboot
the machine, sometimes not.
2. Bad hardware - I'm fighting this right now. I have two identical
machines (well, the setups are identical, some of the cards might be at
different revisions, but still the same model). One machine locks up SOLID
sometime in the middle of the night, usually when something intensive is
going on. Same hard drive (so I know it is not a software problem) in the
other machine works just fine. I suspect heat is causing me a problem,
don't know. The point is that bad memory or a flaky video card can't
magically be isolated by Linux, this is the curse of x86 hardware.
3. Heat - Again, if the hardware starts acting flaky, there is nothing the
OS can do on x86.
Bill Carlson
------------
Systems Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Opinions are mine,
Virtual Hospital http://www.vh.org/ | not my employer's.
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics |
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