Hello! Congratulate me on my first summit to a mailinglist. =) Here is a story about a couple of SparcStation4s.
I have a SparcStation4 which I intended as server so I installed Debian Woody on it - Base Install and ssh, make, gcc, and not much more. I put it in my serverroom and it ran fine for a couple of days. Then it crashed so I had to go there but since I had no keyboard and monitor hooked up to it I couldnt see what was happening, and it did no use trying to plug it in afterwards, so I had to powercycle the machine. I didn't mind much then, but after two more crashes it started to bother me. 3 crashes in two weeks. New to Debian I figured that Woody is bad so I installed Potato. It ran fine for a whole week then same error. I looked in the logs, didn't find anything. I put it up again and 2 days later (5th crash) I said to myself "this computer has faulty hardware" and I replaced it with another SparcStation4 with identical hardwaresetup. With my wrong intuition that Woody is bad I installed potato on it - base and ssh, nothing else. However this one worked, yay! So I thought, a week later it crashed. Remember, this is a different machine. So I went to powercycle it and look more closely this time what happened. I found that the logs had "tty1 respawn", "tty2 respawn", and so on loads of times! Perhaps 200 entries an hour. Also the wtmp were huge, 10MB! The only account was my account and I logged in say perhaps 10 times a day for a week. Typing "last -20" took time. 5 minutes to type out the first 15 entries then i gave up, It has problem parsing the wtmp file. So I let it be, rebooted the machine and left it (this was yesterday). Now its the day after and the new machine has crashed again... However, a friend of mine runs another SparcStation4 on the same network not with identical hardware with Woody on it, he says he havent had any problems... Anyway, thanks for your time! Sincerely - Psychad
