Re: Strange system behavior

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Sep 20, 2010, at 6:16 31PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:21:24 -0700 (PDT) Paul Goyette
> <paul%whooppee.com@localhost> wrote:
>> (Resending without most of the original attachments, since that
>> seems to have exceeded a message-size limit!)
>> 
>> 
>> I have a new machine in my farm, and it is exhibiting some very
>> strange behavior.
>> 
>> Essentially, this machine does nothing more than 'build.sh release"
>> several times daily for port-amd64.  (See [1] for test results!)
>> 
>> About half of the time, the build fails due to some host utility
>> receiving a "segmentation fault", and almost always it fails on the
>> exact same command and at the exact same place in the build!  But
>> re-running the failed command interactively succeeds without any
>> problem.
> 
> I'm betting you have bad memory. Try running memtest86 for a couple
> of days on the box and see what happens.
> 

Yes -- segfault in gcc is almost as good as memtest at detecting memory errors.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb