On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Otis Gospodnetic wrote: > Hello, > > I am having some stability problems with the following LINUX system > and would really appreciate some advice. > 3Com 3c509 NIC (I couldn't keep it running for more than an hour with a > 3c905) I try to stay away from 3com NICs--have had too much trouble with them. Tulip/DECchip cards such as the Kingston KNE100TX or Intel cards such as the Etherexpress Pro 10/100 have worked very well for me. The 3c905 is suspected (by me and a few other people) to mysteriously lock up systems it's running in, presumably due to a bug in the DMA busmaster implementation. I've had it happen on several machines, and the problem always goes away when it's replaced with a Kingston KNE100TX. > RedHat Version 5.2 (2.0.35 Kernel) You may wish to upgrade to 2.0.36, this has an updated Adaptec driver which I believe is more stable than the one in 2.0.35. > Have I put together a marginally stable group of hardware here or is > there some secret I have missed about all the configuration issues of > my selected hardware components? I would love some insight into this One other thing that might be an issue is that you may have some marginal RAM. The comments at the top lead me to believe this may be the case. There's a "sig 11" FAQ that explains what sort of problems marginal ram can cause under Linux, as well as ways to test it (and the BIOS test isn't very good). I don't know offhand what the URL is, but you can probably find a reference to it by searching on www.dejanews.com. One good way to test the ram is to write a script to run a kernel compile about 100 times, and log the compile messages to a file. If one of the compiles fails due to a signal 11 error, it's most likely RAM that is causing the problem.
