Strange segfaults from basic commands

[Steve Kratz]

> On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 11:45 -0500, Michael V. De Palatis wrote:
> > Usually segfaulting that often would be either some sort of 
> hardware 
> > failure or a kernel issue. Perhaps the wrong kernel for your 
> > architecture was installed.
> 
> I've seen that happen when a CPU was overheating.  I'd been 
> cooking french fries in my small apartment, and the oil vapor 
> gummed up the CPU cooler fan.  When it got hot, everything 
> would segmentation fault.  It can probably also happen with 
> bad or overheating RAM.
> 
> --
> Karl Hegbloom <hegbloom at pdx.edu>


When I popped a cd-rom in the box to reinstall dapper, I did a quick
"finger" temperature check on ram/cpu/hard drives, nothing felt even
warm (the rackmount case has some hellaciously high-volume fans on it.)
RAM is always a possibility - kind of strange though, this box had been
on 28 days w/o a reboot, then things went bad.