Re: Strange system behavior

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Sep 26, 2010, at 2:25 24PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:19:07 -0700 (PDT) Paul Goyette
> <paul%whooppee.com@localhost> wrote:
>> Yes - way back at the beginning - almost two weeks ago.  Ran for
>> more than 10 complete passes, with zero errors.
> 
> I don't know how many passes 10 is, but I have found some hardware
> that won't flake out until it has been running memtest for 20 or 30
> hours.
> 
>>> 2) I have a machine that consistently fails while building NetBSD
>>> under NetBSD. It does fine at building NetBSD when running Linux.
>>> I tried reporting the apparent concurrency bugs a long time ago,
>>> but was largely ignored. If (and only if) you run memtest86 for a
>>> day and it passes, try cross-building NetBSD on the box under
>>> Linux and see if it works.
>> 
>> Yuck.  You mean I gotta figure out how to install, set-up, and boot 
>> Linux?  Ouch!
>> 
>> :)
> 
> I hate to say it, but that's pretty much trivial these days. Take
> Ubuntu CD or thumb drive install, put in, answer three or four
> questions, done.
> 
> From there you just have to unpack the NetBSD sources and tell it to
> cross build. The one issue is you'll need to install things like gcc
> and gmake, but that's pretty easy (there's a GUI).
> 

The hard part is figuring out all the myriad pieces you need.  I speak from 
experience here...


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb