[wplug] What to do with a flaky machine

[Bryan J. Smith]

Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> It was running OpenSuSE 9, which I'm not too fond of,
> but it did the job for a while.

Fond or not (I'm a Red Hat lackey myself), it's RPM, so you can run
checksum verifications on all files of all packages with the "-V"
option.  Look for major things that fail checksum verification, like
libraries and binaries.

> 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.

One of the few reasons why I love VMWare snapshots.  ;)

> 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?

Insert standard PC OEM diagnostic CD, run battery of tests.

> So, what would you do?

BTW, I have to ask because this is now biting 75% of people in the
rear -- did someone attach _any_ USB device (especially storage). 
Don't know how many times I've seen that now, regardless of OS, and
people will argue with me until I tell them to just yank it for 2
weeks and see what happens (of which, 100% of the time, it solves the
problem ;).

Otherwise, consider the following order:  
- Replacing Power Supply (Heat-Performance degradation over time)
- Replacing Fan(s), including cleaning the dust out of the unit
- Reseating cables, possibly memory, cleaning off connectors
  (rarely does the job, but it still can happen)
- Possibly Look Into Replacing Hard drive(s), check SMART logs

9 times out of 10, its the Power Supply.  Nearly the other 1 out of
10 times, the mainboard is just going.  Especially with the cheap
resin that comes out of China these days.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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     Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution