stability problems

[jsh3d]

I've been running gentoo on an old comp as a local server for quite a few months, but have lately been using it much more often and have started to have some major stability problems. It's running vsftpd, cvs, mysql, vnc, apache2, and the other usuall stuff. It's mostly just used by me, so the load is really low and shoulden't be an issue.

Basically, what's happening is frequently whenever I send large files via ftp, do a cvs commit, etc, the machine will reboot (no errors or anything like that as far as I can see). Interestingly, it never seems to crash like this when I'm emergeing stuff.

I've ran w2k and freebsd on this exact same box (no changes) for years and haven't had any problems like this, so I'm pretty sure it's not some kind of hardware problem. All of the software running on the machine is updated to the latest version. It's a 2.4 kernel but I can't remember the exact version.

specs:
1ghz p3
640mb ram
nvidia tnt 16mb

Any ideas as to what to try to fix this would be awesome

thanks
-jsh3d

[pmjdebruijn]

Well you're not exactly giving us much information to go by, but you say it typically reboots on heavier network activity.
Try to replace the network card with another? Maybe it's broken. Maybe the driver has issues...
Anyway try to replace it with another card all together, different brand/type.

You just might want to lookup which kernel. 'uname -a'

Good luck,
Pascal de Bruijn

[jsh3d]

hmm, yah, I thought that might be a problem. I replaced the wierd old realtek rtl8139c based card (8139too kernel module) that was in the box with a netgear card (natsemi kernel module), and it may have made a little bit of a difference, but it still freezes and reboots way to often (like every 10-20 minutes).

uname -a output:

[jsh3d]

finally solved the problem.

turns out there were some leaking capacitors on the mobo, I replaced those and now everything is working fine

-jsh3d