[Gllug] Diagnosing hardware faults

[John Edwards]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 06:35:45PM +0000, Alain Williams wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 05:39:41PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
>> 
>> I believe one of my machines to have developed a hardware fault.
>> It intermittently[1] exhibits one of three behaviours:
> 
> Can you get a console on it (non GUI), anything appear as it dies ?

VGA consoles can die before you see any error messages, so
hooking up a serial console to a remote machine and getting
the kernel and syslog to send important logs there can help.

The Shuttle boxes are small and some do not have good air flow,
especially around the hard drive. Running lmsensors and hddtemp
at regular intervals could spot any heat problems.

The other possibilities are CPU, motherboard, RAM (memtest will
not catch errors that occur under load) and the PSU. Of these
the most likely to fail is the PSU. If you are lucky then you
may have a motherboard where lmsensors can monitor voltages.


-- 
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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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