Now that my server is rebuilt, my problem is that it keeps crashing kernel panicking and I saw segmentation faults all over the place. All roads point to hardware problems. So how do i solve this? Well, first off, my old memory modules work in the new machine. I installed one of them (512 MB) and the machine seemed to stay up all night with one exception. I noticed that it had rebooted at 5:32 am. In all the other crashing, it never once rebooted. That got me thinking that the UPS I plugged the machine into (an old one) wasn’t powerful enough and a surge that put the system on battery failed to move it to battery and the server restarted. At least, that’s what I hope happened. So I got to thinking, how could 2 brand new memory modules fail. I remembered that when I was handed the memory, they were in adjoining pouches. I checked the serial numbers and they were 12 apart meaning that they most likely came from the same batch and if a batch was bad, both modules could be bad. So this evening I used a program called Memtest86 which supposedly thoroughly tests RAM. I popped in each new RAM modules one at a time and after less than a minute, each module showed thousands of errors. Then I put both in and after 20 minutes I saw 500+ errors; I’m not sure why the results were different with 1 vs. 2, but it convinced me that there was a real problem. I then tested my 2 old memory modules (slower, but the same capacity) and after an hour, they showed no errors.
Now I’m running the server with the old RAM and will see what happens. On Monday, I’ll go back to The Chip Merchant and get the RAM replaced.
I wish all this just worked and I didn’t have to futz with it.