On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> 
> In message <40CF2E3E.8040103@distal.com>, Chris Ross writes:
>> Jaromir Dolecek wrote:
>>> The very current current  2.0F works fine with 768MB RAM (dual PIII@1260).
>>> Faulty RAM perhaps?
>>
>>   Possibly, but each of them caused the same problem, and I'd
>> figure that's statistically unlikely.  And they all run fine
>> with other operating systems.
>>
>>   I'm rebuilding from current current now, and will verify
>> the problem still exists.  Thanks for the report!
>
> I had problems on a laptop with memory -- I had two indivdiual DIMMs
> that worked fine by themselves, but failed if used together.  I
> strongly suggest running memtest86.  (You can find it in pkgsrc, but I
> wonder if that's an older version -- the version at http://www.memtest86.com/
> seems to run from a bootable CD, and the pkgsrc version runs from a
> floppy.)  There's also http://www.memtest.org/, which claims to be a
> newer development tree, but I've never tried it.
>
>
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
hi,

i think that steve is on the right path regarding to this topic; to me it 
sounds very likely to be a hardware related issue, i.e. steve said that 
the combination of both dimms caused trouble seems to be a problem with 
the second dimm's added load (capacity, timing etc.) to the (memory) bus.

memtest86 could provide a hint.

is anyone able to test a machine with the same config (i.e. same memory 
size), but using *ECC* ram? maybe that would kick the bucket... ;)

regards,

timo schoeler