[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 (or other solid state device) is just going,
especially with the cheap resin that comes out of China these days. 
Hard drives have SMART and other reporting mechanisms that warn you. 
Electronics do not (especially now that parity/ECC memory is not
used).


-- 
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