4 ms·

I followed a similar route where I eventually got to blaming bad (ECC) RAM, even sending it back to Crucial. In the end though, it wasn’t bad RAM. It was a bad

I followed a similar route where I eventually got to blaming bad (ECC) RAM, even sending it back to Crucial. In the end though, it wasn’t bad RAM. It was a bad RAM socket. This is one reason I’m now allergic to hardware and prefer to have someone else look after it.

temac 7y ago
You had a bad ram socket that silently corrupted data while you used ecc?
- tokamak-teapot 7y ago
  No, it crashed the machine when I hit certain addresses. Or rather, when /something/ did. Hitting this part of RAM wasn’t predictable, so it was only when I considered that it seemed my crashes happened when the OS might be allocating more RAM than usual that I looked at RAM. I saw errors in memtest86 and blamed the RAM. But then the replacement had a similar problem. And then I switched modules around slots. And then I realised.
tbyehl 7y ago
Hardware is evil, this is why we migrate everything to The Cloud! And get angry every time The Cloud serves us a painful reminded that it's just Someone Else's Hardware. My favorite Faulty RAM story involves working for a hosting company that at some point homebrewed some Linux-based TCP/IP load balancers to offer customers instead of a proper F5 or whatever. This particular load balancer is restarting itself every time one of the Windows servers behind it fails a health check. Obviously not a desirable situation. A tenacious young tech not yet battle-hardened to the fallibility of hardware had been working on the load balancer for hours. Eventually throws his hands up and calls for a Windows guy 'cause obviously Windows must be doing something weird to make the Linux crash. Linux never crashes, amiright? Grizzled veteran that I am, I'm telling him to replace the RAM before he can finish explaining. If you can't fathom what the problem could be, if it really isn't DNS[0], it's probably going to be RAM. If it's not RAM... update your resume and burn everything to the ground. [0] https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/

temac 7y ago

You had a bad ram socket that silently corrupted data while you used ecc?

tokamak-teapot 7y ago
No, it crashed the machine when I hit certain addresses. Or rather, when /something/ did. Hitting this part of RAM wasn’t predictable, so it was only when I considered that it seemed my crashes happened when the OS might be allocating more RAM than usual that I looked at RAM. I saw errors in memtest86 and blamed the RAM. But then the replacement had a similar problem. And then I switched modules around slots. And then I realised.

tbyehl 7y ago

Hardware is evil, this is why we migrate everything to The Cloud! And get angry every time The Cloud serves us a painful reminded that it's just Someone Else's Hardware. My favorite Faulty RAM story involves working for a hosting company that at some point homebrewed some Linux-based TCP/IP load balancers to offer customers instead of a proper F5 or whatever. This particular load balancer is restarting itself every time one of the Windows servers behind it fails a health check. Obviously not a desirable situation. A tenacious young tech not yet battle-hardened to the fallibility of hardware had been working on the load balancer for hours. Eventually throws his hands up and calls for a Windows guy 'cause obviously Windows must be doing something weird to make the Linux crash. Linux never crashes, amiright? Grizzled veteran that I am, I'm telling him to replace the RAM before he can finish explaining. If you can't fathom what the problem could be, if it really isn't DNS[0], it's probably going to be RAM. If it's not RAM... update your resume and burn everything to the ground. [0] https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/