I am starting to have major problems with my SmoothWall PC. I am fairly sure
that these problems are hardware related because if I reset or re-boot the PC
without giving it plenty of time, The kernel either hangs or panics. These
chrashes usually happen when I'm on-line and down-loading large files, but
the other day I had closed the connection and it crashed after the connection
was closed. I was able to copy only part of the error info before the screen
went blank.
<error>
Unable to handle NULL pointer dereference at address 0000001d
current-> tss.cr3=00101000, %cr3=00101000
pde=00000000
Oops:0000
CPU:0
EIP:0010:[<c01252b4>]
EFLAGS:00010202
EAX:00000001 EBX:00000001 ECX:00000000 EDX:a0680000
ESI:00000000 EDI:00000001 EBP:00001000 ESP:c0095???
</error>
This was when the screen went blank. I've also seen the screen filled with
the 'Unable to handle NULL pointer dereference' error and also with a full
screen of various register data. As I said, this usually happens when I'm
downloading large files and at first I thought it might be a 'cracker' but
the fact that turning the system off and back on within several minutes would
not boot, I figure it must be hardware related. There is no info in
/var/log/messages. The last entry before the next kernel boot is just <mark>.
My question is, Which piece of hardware is it likely to be?
I've a 100Mhz Overdrive Pentium processor. I could probably put the original
486 back into it. I've got several SIMM's that I could change and I'm
currently downloading the latest ISO for Smoothwall, since it's only 23M.
Should I try running the memory tester I saw mentioned in a recent mail? or
the CPU cooker to see which part is falling over? I was also thinking of just
putting the harddrive, NIC and modem into another box but I'd realy like to
know which part is faulty and scrap it. I don't know if any of the above info
sheds any linght on the subject, but I thought I'd include it incase it could
identify the culprit.
Thanks for any info.
John Gay
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