On Fri, 07 Feb 2003 11:48, you wrote: > I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it's unlikely that the RAM > has suddenly failed on this new machine. I might suspect it a bit > more on a 4-year-old one.
New hardware is just as likely as old hardware to have a fault which only exhibits itself occasionally. Of course, every time a piece of hardware is touched by grubby ungrounded fingers it `rolls again' on its chances of developing a fault :-). A better point would be that a Dell server is almost certain to have ECC RAM, making the chance of a fault very slim indeed. If only PC hardware would dump its memory to swap in the event of a system crash like Sparc hardware does ... would make debugging this sort of thing easier. Oh, well look at that there is a patch to Linux to do that (assuming your VM/kernel is not so smashed that it can't even write to swap). Take a look at the `crash' debian package. Worth installing on every machine, I'd say. -- Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Automatic" simply means that you cannot repair it yourself. - anon.
