<quote who="Matthias Scheler">
> In article <20040120164606.GA166@quartz.newn.cam.ac.uk>,
> 	Patrick Welche <prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk> writes:
[...elided...]
>>
>> and all froze. Does that say "memory is going bad"?
>
> Not necesarrily. The kernel could have done something like "foo->bar--" on
> the overwritten memory location. But it could of cause also be a hardware
> problem. A good test is to compile something big (e.g. KDE 3). If your
> computer survives that without a segmentation fault from gcc the memory
> is probably ok.

I've tried that in the past; it works OK.  A better test it to build and
use the "memtest" boot disk from pkgsrc.

I built one a few weeks ago, and found out why three of my servers were
randomly rebooting/freezing in ways that look alarmingly like this.  I
also threw away three sticks of RAM that were 'only bad in one spot'.

-- 
Dave Burgess
CTO and Chief Engineer, Nebraska On-Ramp
Bellevue, NE 68123