>> I'm running NetBSD 1.5.1 on a Pentium 100 with 8 megabytes of ram.
>it's much probably this machine isn't good. memory is the first thing to
>check.

This machine has run Windows for 2 years, Linux for approximately 3 years..
With Linux it had an uptime of about one year and regularly ran
X11, so did a lot of swapping.

>try disabling external cache in BIOS. if without ext cache crashes
>faster/more often your memory is broken. if stops crashing - your external
>cache is broken.

I apologise for not being clear; this machine has been running happily for about
3 weeks. It happened just now, seemingly out of the blue. It is not reproducable
as far as I can see. (Again, suprisingly similar to the openbsd posting)
However, the external cache is now disabled.

>> is this just memory exhaustion?
>i'm using netbsd on 486 25-66Mhz, 8MB RAM+12MB swap and got over 100 days
>uptime on one machine. this machines are used for NAT, but some other
>programs are on them.

% swapctl -l
Device      512-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Priority
/dev/wd0b       133245     2512   130733     2%    0

It was running, at the time of crash, rpcbind, nfsd, rpc.bootparams, inetd, rarpd, sshd, cron and syslogd, as well as a fairly full ipnat and ipf ruleset.


Thanks.