Re: NetBSD 5.1 RC3 in production

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 18 Sep 2010 23:46:18 -0500
    From:        Francisco Valladolid <ficovh%gmail.com@localhost>
    Message-ID:  
<AANLkTikmgBXRKi=M6yO6KDnP3XRMOPX7csEBPpBFY2Ep%mail.gmail.com@localhost>

  | Now, 11:45 pm (GMT -6 time) it's down.

Sorry, what's the "it" ?

  | I have 5.1 RC3 in my home server running it has 15 days without problems

I've had it running much longer than that - more or less from the day
RC3 was tagged (I was already planning on installing a 5.1 RC something,
and RC3 turned up just at the right time).   At one stage it stayed up for
almost 2 months.   It isn't a disaster, it's just not a stable as 4 was.

  | I'm running postgresql, nginx, php5; it's a old PIII 500 with 512MB RAM

munnari is a P5 something (one of the last generation of uniprocessors,
it has hyperthreading, but that's disabled).   A few years old now, but
not ancient.   It runs mostly sendmail and bind, and gcc...
(there's an FTP server, NTP, and all that stuff, but they're
comparatively insignificant.)

  | Umm, I believe a Hardware related error.

I'm pretty sure hardware errors don't cause tstile lockups, and while
anything is possible for the crashes, it would be a huge coincidence if
some hardware component just happened to break when NetBSD 5 was installed.
It is certainly not impossible, but it isn't my first guess.

If it happened often enough that I could expect to catch it, I'd enable
ddb and find out what happened, but the crashes aren't that frequent,
the system isn't unusable by any means.   I don't want (can't allow) it
to crash sometime and sit in ddb for hours while I sleep...

kre