[wplug] What to do with a flaky machine

[Michael Semcheski]

On 8/14/07, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:
> 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).

No, the machine has been more or less untouched physically in the last
year.  Except for one thing.  Someone attached it to a KVM last week.
I don't believe in coincidences, but I really doubt that affected it.

But no -- no usb devices in our entire server room.  As Bryan
mentioned, there's a good chance that this could be power supply
related.

Does anyone know of a simple and easy way to check SMART values?