A quick recap on the issues I’ve encountered with my “new” linux box since I built it late last year.

1. PC wouldn’t POST. Turns out the cheap arse motherboard I bought was overclocking my RAM, which didn’t like it much. Fixed by hard setting RAM speed in the BIOS.

2. Writing files across Samba shares resulted in the data written giving CRC errors when read back. In the end I found this was caused by the CPU overheating and getting to 100 degrees celcius. Fixed by replacing the heatsink and fan for a much better aftermarket model, though I suspect the stock Intel one had been faulty.

3. Memory errors in syslog, corresponding to high network traffic. Found that the NIC on the motherboard is incorrectly detected and used by recent Debian/Ubuntu releases. Fix was to install the correct drivers (posted about this earlier). The errors pop up very rarely now, so I’m not sure this is 100% resolved, but it is much better.

4. Hard freezes. This is the last one I’m working on. At first I believed VMware was the cause, so I migrated to Virtualbox. I also tried removing one of the two DIMMS, and thought that fixed it. Only to have the issue pop up weeks later. So today I’ve put the second DIMM back in, as since I removed the old SATA controller, I haven’t had a hard crash.

5. XP VM CPU getting stuck at 50-100% usage. Seems to be a Virtualbox issue, haven’t been able to resolve it fully. I’ve disabled all hardwave VT knobs for the VM itself, which seems to have helped. At least it hasn’t reoccured in quite a while.

6. Linux VM processes segfaulting. Specifically the cacti poller on my oldest VM. This was originally run under windows in VMWare. I suspect this is a software issue with the VM itself, rather than with its environment. The machine is overdue for a complete rebuild (it is running Debian 4), so this sill probably fix itself when I rebuild the machine.