Hi. As the subject suggests, I get strange freeze-ups on my machine. Yes, it's definitely frozen... I can't ping it from my lan, and nothing responds... no keybd, no mouse, no nothing.
This occurs once every couple of weeks. So far I have not been able to get more than 21 days of uptime, since installing Debian 2.1 on this machine in mid-April of this year. The funny thing that I started to notice the last time it locked up is that the system clock jumps when it occurs. I had been noticing funny syslogs in the sense that I would see normal log entries occurring at, let's say, 10:00, then it would lock up and I'd reboot and then I'd see the end of the syslog contain new records that were from 9:45... 15 mins EARLIER. It took me a while to put 2 and 2 together, but I can safely say now that each time the machine freezes, the clocks either skips ahead or behind anywhere from 15-25 minutes, and I have to re-set the time after rebooting. Another interesting thing is this part of my /var/log/syslog file: Aug 11 01:12:55 my_machine pppd[14060]: sent [LCP EchoReq id=0x60 magic=0x6e5674f0] Aug 11 01:12:55 my_machine pppd[14060]: rcvd [LCP EchoRep id=0x60 magic=0x4f4b52b8] Aug 11 01:13:25 my_machine pppd[14060]: sent [LCP EchoReq id=0x61 magic=0x6e5674f0] Aug 11 01:13:25 my_machine pppd[14060]: rcvd [LCP EchoRep id=0x61 magic=0x4f4b52b8] [EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]@ The next log entry from pppd would have occurred 30 seconds after the last one, except this is where my machine froze... and apparently whatever process was writing to the syslog file at the time got screwed and just dumped garbage into it. It MAY only be occurring while X is running, although I can't really verify that since X is always running. The reason I say that though is because the last 3 times this happened, it was while I was dragging windows around or picking items from drop-down lists in Netscape (4.51 Comm). I am running XFree86 3.3.3.1-2 (from netgod.net/x), although this also happened with the stock slink XFree86. I'm on a 2.0.37 kernel... but again this was an issue in 2.0.36 as well. Window manager is Window Maker 0.53. Hardware is a P133, Asus P/I P55T2P4 mobo, 64 MB RAM, NE2000 NIC, Hercules Dynamite 128/Video card (2 MB). Has anyone got any ideas about where I might look for a solution to this? Unfortunately I cannot make this happen at will, it seems to be quite unpredictable. Also, any (free) software I can get that would be able to perform some thorough tests on my RAM and CPU? Perhaps it's one of those ubiquitous "hardware issues." Thanks for any assistance provided.
