[wplug] What to do with a flaky machine

[Michael Semcheski]

I thought I'd pose this question to the list...  I've got a Dell
Precision workstation of an early 2000's vintage.  It was a pretty
good machine back in the day.  Its got a 15,000 rpm SCSI, two Pentium
3's, and 512MB or 1GB of ECC memory (I think.)

About two years ago, it was made into a general purpose, nothing too
critical server.  We had a CVS repository on it for a while, and a
couple of mediawiki instances, nagios, and probably more stuff.  It
was running OpenSuSE 9, which I'm not too fond of, but it did the job
for a while.

Not too long ago, we got a brand new machine to do everything the old
Precision did, and more.  The only thing the new machine couldn't do
was nagios, because we had to put it on a restricted network, where it
wouldn't have access to anything we'd want to check.

In between, some stuff happened.  Its a long story, involving YaST2, a
major version upgrade, dependencies and the Knights Templar.  The
short version is, I screwed up KDE to the point that it was completely
broken.  But that's what ssh is for, anyway.

So this machine was running along, without having to do all that much,
and everything was good.  The OS was somewhere in between OpenSuSE 9
and 10.  It wasn't ideal, but it wasn't a problem that I planned on
fixing.

Fast forward to last Friday, when it started acting really flaky.  By
Sunday, it had to be rebooted.  It didn't seem to have booted after 3
hours, but somehow, on Monday morning, it was running.  Slowly.

So, there's nothing too important on there.  We don't need the
computer for anything, but if the hardware's OK, we'll find a use for
it.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about figuring out
what's wrong?

I would like to proceed as if there were some critical service or data
on there, and moving it off of that box was out of the question.  I am
going to pretend that I have to figure out what is wrong with this
machine without destroying its contents, just because it could be a
useful exercise.  So, what would you do?