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The server was becoming increasingly erratic, even failing when run from a CD. I took out the original RAM and ran Memtest86+ over the new RAM I bought last month. No errors after an hour but when checking again after five hours there were hundreds reported, clustered around a couple of locations. I'm now retesting the original RAM for longer to double-check that's good. I'm going to install Debian Lenny on the server, as I'd prefer that to be as solid & stable as possible. Just not [[http://www.bostonspabeerfestival.co.uk/][tomorrow]] :)

-- Main.MartinRowe - 19 Feb 2010

Well, it had been running smoothly for a fortnight so of course I decided to upgrade <nop>VirtualBox to 3.1.4 which came out at the weekend. Not good. The virtual machine has dropped out three times and taken the server with it twice :( Back on 3.1.2 for the time being.

-- Main.MartinRowe - 15 Feb 2010 

RAM upgrade on the host server, bringing the host up to 8GB and this vm to 3.6GB. As the vm is still a 32bit Debian Lenny install it's not able to use memory beyond that. No recurrence of the page allocation failures since moving to the Realtek NIC so far. Before switching NICs the error cropped up within a day on 2.6.31, so I'm hopeful it's sorted.

-- Main.MartinRowe - 26 Jan 2010

Still more struggles with the server. It managed a week without the allocation errors, running on a 2.6.28 kernel, until I had a large amount of files to move from my desktop to the server over the gigabit link. The error happened again at the start of the transfer. After a reboot into the latest kernel I can trigger the error most times I do transfers, but it happens at other times too. I've now put in a Realtek gigabit card and will see how it goes with that. The errors don't seem to do much beyond expanding the log files, but that doesn't make them any less annoying.

-- Main.MartinRowe - 23 Jan 2010

[[http://foswiki.org/Download/WebHome][Foswiki 1.0.9]] is now available. This server has been running the release candidate (1.0.9rc2) for the last week and it's worked well.

-- Main.MartinRowe - 18 Jan 2010

I've updated the firmware on my router to the latest version of [[http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato][Jonathan Zarate's Tomato]] firmware plus [[http://touristinparadise.blogspot.com/2008/04/linksys-wrt54gl-routers-improving.html][Rodney Chua's SpeedMod]] patches. That seems to squeeze out the best performance from my Linksys <nop>WRT54GL:

<img src="http://www.speedtest.net/result/682571339.png">

<nop>VirtualBox is at 3.1.2 but I just cannot get a stable host system with the 2.6.31* Karmic kernels. I also think setting the network adapter to use the virtual Intel PRO/1000 device causes instability too. There are no problems with a 2.6.31 kernel and <nop>VirtualBox on my backup server. That may be down to it being a 32bit host install - this is on a 64bit Athlon II machine - but I still can't pin down a cause. 

-- Main.MartinRowe - 14 Jan 2010

Still getting the occasional page allocation error even with the old kernel from Jaunty. Updated [[http://www.virtualbox.org/][VirtualBox]] to 3.1.0 without any improvement, so trying again with 3.1.2.

-- Main.MartinRowe - 2 Jan 2010

---++ Previous years' news

   * [[NewsPage2009][2009 News]]
   * [[NewsPage2008][2008 News]]
   * [[NewsPage2007][2007 News]]
   * [[NewsPage2006][2006 News]]
   * [[NewsPage2005][2005 News]]
   * Older news can be accessed from [[http://www.dbg400.net/oldnews.html][www.dbg400.net/oldnews.html]]
Topic revision: r71 - 19 Feb 2010 - 23:46:53 - MartinRowe
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