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Date:      Mon, 27 Aug 2001 23:34:35 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org>
To:        Tenebrae <tenebrae@niceboots.com>
Cc:        Alex Varju <varju@webct.com>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 4.4-rc instability 
Message-ID:  <200108280434.f7S4YZw91567@grumpy.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from Tenebrae <tenebrae@niceboots.com>  of "Mon, 27 Aug 2001 10:11:21 PDT." <Pine.BSF.4.21.0108271001190.3883-100000@steeltoe.niceboots.com> 

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Tenebrae writes:
> 
> I had a similar problem back in May - bad memory.  I replaced the cheap
> ghetto RAM I had in there with some nice spiffy Micron RAM and my server
> is now quite happy.  I wish I had known about memtest before.  It would
> have saved me a lot of headaches and fdisks (and leaping from -RELEASE to
> -STABLE when I didn't necessarily need to).
> It's only an extra couple bucks these days to get a reliable brand of RAM
> like Micron or Kingston.  It's definitely worth it IMHO.

And you only have to go thru an exercise like that once with non-parity 
memory and then once more with parity memory to become a believer in 
parity checked memory.

Used to run an installation of about 40 machines, mixed SGI and Sun.
Part of my weekly check was a scan for logged recovered memory errors.
They simply happened sometimes to even healthy machines. But often when
a machine started crashing or unusual process termination, I'd find
several memory errors logged. When the machine is under a maintenance
contract entries in the system log make it easy to have the soft memory
replaced before the machine becomes unstable.

My Asus A7V MB does not support parity/ECC. Am not happy that it
doesn't. But I bought parity/ECC PC133 SDRAM for it because I've noticed
I recycle memory and tape drives when retiring MB's and CPU's. Will 
heavily prefer something supporting ECC when the A7V is replaced.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.



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