-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Did you check the mainboard for popped capacitors? Anything that's between 5-10 years old could still be suffering from the capacitor plague. That would account for the sudden onset and now-consistent failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague - --Bob. On 2016-06-14 11:10 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: > We have a computer that started doing random and frequent restarts > on the weekend. We don't know why. > > Any suggestions? > > It looks as if the power dips momentarily and the computer > reboots, with no message that we have observe. But it could just > as easily be a crash of some other kind that leaves no trace. > > The system is an HP Compaq Pro 6300 Small Form Factor PC running > Fedora 20. > > The crash seems to be at different points (i.e. not one consistent > software activity). The crashes don't seem correlated with heavy > workloads (eg. it crashed a couple of times while I was staring at > log files to see if there was any hint of the problem). > > Hypothesis: a Fedora 20 bug. But the software has not been changed > in months. Updates have not been appled this year. Since the > behaviour has changed without the software changing, I don't think > that Fedora is to blame. > > Hypothesis: it might be heat-related (the room it is in gets warm). > I vacuumed out the interior and defuzzed the heat sinks. This did > not improve the uptime. > > Hypothesis: it might be contact-related. So I disconnected and > reconnected most internal connectors and reseated the memory. This > did not seem to improve the uptime. > > Hypothesis: it might be the power supply. Normally, I'd swap > power supplies to test this hypothesis but this Small Form Factor > computer has a unique (and probably expensive) power supply. I > opted to move the disk to a Dell OptiPlex 990 Small Form Factor > computer and use that. > > The Dell, with the HP's disk, seems stable. No rebooting. This is > in the same warm room, but the weather has changed. > > In the original HP box, I installed a disk that I had laying around > (a 60G drive from a discarded laptop), installed Ubuntu 16.04, and > have been running four CPU-bound processes for 24 hours. No crash. > I admit that this is in a cooler room. The heat and power load of > a laptop drive is less than that of a 3.5" HDD, but I would not > think that that is significant. > > The computer is a couple of years old but still has a year of > warranty. There are confidential files on the disk drive so I'd > like to narrow down the problem before calling in HP support. > Asking for a particular replacement part is more convenient that > shipping the computer back to HP. --- Talk Mailing List > [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk > - -- Bob Jonkman <[email protected]> Phone: +1-519-635-9413 SOBAC Microcomputer Services http://sobac.com/sobac/ Software --- Office & Business Automation --- Consulting GnuPG Fngrprnt:04F7 742B 8F54 C40A E115 26C2 B912 89B0 D2CC E5EA -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 Comment: Ensure confidentiality, authenticity, non-repudiability iEYEARECAAYFAldgItsACgkQuRKJsNLM5eqQtQCeKScb/G9mNhVJDtLId7xtYz2Y oTkAnRplr3GRssf8YkMp6IPL5TqLetlL =w0Y0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
