Hej there folks.

A few months ago I changed my Windows NT 4.0 server to Linux (Slackware 8.0), because I was sick of NT 4 crashing every couple of days.
This is the first machine I really run linux on for a purpose, I had another machine running it just for fun and testing, but that's about all my experience with it

Anyhow, I thought things were going quite smooth, apache runs, samba even works as PDC and I even got my ftp server back up and running.

However, now the problem: Every once in a while, the machine kills itself with kernel panic, in appearantly random processes. First I blamed Samba, but even when not running samba it seems to happen. Especially when doing a lot of stuff concerning file transfers (i.e. moving an entire Cd image from one place to another, whether that's through samba, ftp or local doesn't make a difference) it seems to happen...

I have used hdparm to speed things up, however, I disabled it to make sure it didn't cause it and it still happens.
I upgraded the kernel to 2.4.18, and although the machine boots a lot faster, it still panics once every while.

Of course, I figured: well, it may very well be the memory. So I ran memtest (www.memtest86.com) on it for a night, nothing bad.

Switched the processor a few times, had a Pentium 120 Mhz in it, now it's a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz. No difference....

Any ideas anyone?
(or any more information needed, if so, how can I get that info?)

Oh btw, the harddisks (2) are not the problem, since they're quite new Maxtor disks, 20 Gb each.

Thanks for reading,

BenV

There's no "Out of memory" error. The kernel hangs or kills processes.
I think it may be the reason. Try to add some RAM or increase swap. It should help.

At the moment I have 64 Mb RAM and 128 Mb swap... how much would you recommend?
Also, if the system would run out of memory, wouldn't I hear something about that in my syslog or something like that?

**update**: I've increased my swap space to 256 Mb.
But alas, my machine still died when I tried to copied a cd image to it's secondary disk....

I can only speak from my experience. Pentium 120, 64MB RAM. Had similar problems with 140MB swap. With ~300MB was OK. I don't copy big files on this machine, but it reads/writes much data from netwok.

Well, it doesn't seem to be the case here.... (unfortunately)... when I'm copying files to the machine, "free" reports almost no swap usage either, so I think it's something else.... but what????
anyone?

Maybe a kernel bug? have you tried with another one?

I've tried with the default kernels from the Slackware install disk (2.2.? as wel as 2.4.5), which were slower but as far as I can tell they crashed like the current one.... (2.4.18)