5.4-RELEASE crashing

[Kris Kennaway]

Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:
> I upgraded memory in a 5.4-RELEASE server from 1GB (2x512MB) to 4GB
> (4x1GB). I'm wondering if that can even be causing my problem since
> nothing went wrong for an entire week. One week later, the server just
> stops responding in the middle of the night, I can see the login prompt,
> but cannot type anything, no response to keyboard at all. Since the
> initial crash one week after the memory upgrade, it continues to do this
> every couple of days.
> 
> The crash has happened during the 3-4am time span every time except at
> 9pm once and then this morning at 9am. So, it seems it may be related to
> something building up over time. After reset and disk cleanup, I have
> examined the logs and cannot find anything in the message log, one entry
> shows my last login activity and the next entry is the start of boot
> info from the reset. The only thing I find in the logs erroneous is an
> NFS connection not responding, then alive again, but I unmounted and
> disabled the entry in fstab before it happened this morning.
> 
> I'm just trying to figure out how to approach tracking down my crashing
> issue. Whether it somehow is related to the memory upgrade. The only
> thing to note about the memory upgrade is on boot, it will say that it
> is ignoring a small amount of memory over 4GB. Can someone suggest how
> to approach my problem?
> 

It's almost certain to be bad RAM.  Try swapping it out incrementally 
until the problem goes away, then toss that stick in the garbage :)

Kris