X died overnight

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 14 March 2006 17:37, Gary Hodges wrote:
> Second time this has happened.  First time was a few months ago. 
> The following repeats thirteen times at irregular intervals over a
> three hour period in the log file.  I edited out the time hacks to
> make it more readable.

Gary,

I can't tell what the problem might be from the log, but the 
irregularity of it does ring a loud alarm for me. Highly erratic 
problems without apparent triggers or causes are more often than not 
hardware-related. The common suspects are failing RAM and power 
supply.

RAM is best tested with memtest, run it more than once to have a valid 
test case. If you prefer the box to stay up the old-fashioned way of 
compiling big packages like a kernel over and over is still an 
excellent test. Power supplies are best tested by replacing them.

This might not be your problem at all but there's nothing worse than 
trying to find a weird software fault only to discover after much 
effort that it's hardware after all.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five