I have a Dell Optiplex GX240 that I've now loaded RedHat 8.0 on several times-

Each time, it installs and runs fine- then, about two weeks later, you can't log in, and a restart of the system results in extremely slow starting of services- as in, each one takes about 5 minutes to start-

Disk space is fine.

I thought I had it fixed by adjusting the layout of the /etc/hosts file, but it's back to doing what it did before now...

It pings itself and other hosts locally by both hostname and FQDN, so I'm fairly sure DNS is right-

any ideas?
Is this a Dell issue? something with hardware that I'm not aware of?

Tim

Sounds like a hardware issue, possibly a memory leak. Have you run any memory or any other tests to check?

It doesn't seem to be hardware related-

1 - happens upon a reboot, so I would assume that a memory leak has been cleared up, at least temporarily..

2. I moved the HD to another Dell Optiplex (different type system- GX270, I think)
and it did the same thing booting up-

I haven't tried it on plain clone hardware, since I don't have a spare system like that-
this place is _totally_ Dell-ified...

I would also assume that a system-specific hardware problem would occur almost immediately, not after the system's been up for a while, with the exception of a memory leak- which a shutdown-power down of the system should fix..

I've had this problem three times with this:

1. RH9.0 load on this platform- after about 3 weeks, one day I noticed I couldn't login quickly- rebooted the server, and it started slowly- Kernel loads fast, but when it gets to services (I forget which one is first) but, right from the start, ALL the services take about 5 mins each..

2. I formatted and rebuilt the system on RH9.0 - it quit for about a week-
then did the same thing exactly....

3. Then, I rebuilt it (ground up again) on 8.0, thinking I had a RH9 incompatibility issue-
Now the 8.0 system is doing it- as mentioned above, I've swapped hardware "out from under the drive" -

This ONLY happens in runlevels 345 - not in single user mode at all...

The only two areas I can think of that this could be is some failure on the part of the drive-
The argument for this is that I'm now running in single user mode, starting the services I need (mrtg, ssh, httpd) manually, and it's just fine-

The other area is that this _could_ be a DNS error of some sort-
but I've got it right, I think....
nslookup returns correct info from other systems-
/etc/hosts:
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs

# that require network functionality will fail.
10.10.1.182 acslinux acslinux.asheville.k12.nc.us acslinux


127.0.0.1 acslinux localhost.localdomain localhost

/etc/resolv.conf
search asheville.k12.nc.us

nameserver 10.10.1.8
nameserver 10.10.1.20

output of two nslookups (host and FQDN)
> acslinux
Server: 10.10.1.8
Address: 10.10.1.8#53

Name: acslinux.asheville.k12.nc.us
Address: 10.10.1.182
> acslinux.asheville.k12.nc.us
Server: 10.10.1.8
Address: 10.10.1.8#53

Name: acslinux.asheville.k12.nc.us
Address: 10.10.1.182
>

Any thoughts?

It doesn't sound like a hardware issue, but it might be. Since it runs OK in single user mode, I would boot to single user and then start the severices in run level 3 one at a time. We can take it from there.
Useful things to look at while starting the services are
top;
vmstat 3;
iostat 2;
tail -f /var/log/messages;
Lets see what happens with that.