John Mendenhall wrote:
>> PS a dmesg would be useful...
>
> Sorry! I forgot the dmesg.
much better...
The symptoms you describe sound like classic hardware problems,
however, I see a couple things worthy of note in your dmesg:
> -----
> OpenBSD 4.0 (GENERIC) #1107: Sat Sep 16 19:15:58 MDT 2006
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
> cpu0: AMD Duron(tm) Processor ("AuthenticAMD" 686-class, 64KB L2 cache) 1.61
> GHz
> cpu0:
> FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE
No idea why, but I've seen a number of AMD systems of that
vintage which were temperamental about their RAM. Wasn't that
the RAM was bad...but the system bus timing was off in some
way.
Curiously, these machines had more-than-usual amounts of clock
speed control, and they seemed to settle down by cranking down
the clock speed a tad. You won't miss it, really.
I'm not quite as quick to say, "replace your memory" as some of
the others here, as there are a LOT of things in a modern
computer (or an old one) which can cause problems as you
describe. It could also be a bad power supply, the problems
you report are when the machine is "doing something" more than
idling, so maybe the power supply isn't responding to surges
well. Keep in mind, there are multiple power supplies in a
modern computer: the big silver box you are thinking of, but
there is also the CPU power supply on the main board -- if
that's bad, you are out of luck (and unfortunately, stories
of those bad PS capacitors seem to keep coming up, we got an
office full of Dell P4-2.8GHz machines which are starting to
show bulging capacitors).
...
> rl0 at pci0 dev 10 function 0 "Realtek 8139" rev 0x10: irq 12, address
> 00:e0:06:f6:bf:3e
> rlphy0 at rl0 phy 0: RTL internal PHY
...
That looks bad. IRQ12 is used by mouse hardware (an ISA device,
so it can't share interrupts). See if you can persuade your
BIOS to give the NIC a different IRQ. Yeah, there is no visible
conflict, it looks like you don't have the mouse plugged in, but
I don't trust it...
Nick.
