Strange Lock Up problems

[Richard Wilson]

All,

I am wondering if anyone has seen anything like this...

I have a Compaq AP550 workstation with a single 866 Mhz Intel CPU
running Fedora Core 3 (which I keep up to date).

This system has 1GB of RAM, a Synergy ELSA 2 AGP video card with 32 MB
of RAM.  The OEM motherboard has onboard Adaptec Ultra 3 SCSI, an
onboard 10/100 NIC and dual IDE channels.   It has been a very good
Linux workstation.

I added a DE500 PCI NIC card I had left over from an old DEC Alpha
system in one of the slots.  It was in there for months and I hadn't
used it until two days ago when I tried (unsuccessfully) to use it with
a crossover cable to back up a Windows laptop (thank you to those who
pointed me at Bacula!)  At the time the primary NIC (eth0) was tied up
with my VPN connection and wouldn't talk outside the VPN cloud.  I later
got the backup working through my router after getting off my VPN
connection.

Yesterday, after booting up OK my workstation locked up after about an
hour.  Locked up = no response from ANYTHING short of forcing the power
off.  It started rebooting OK, ran a full check on my hard drive
partitions but froze up again before completing the boot up.

I removed the DE500 card, unseated and reseated EVERYTHING, and actually
had it boot once or twice w/o locking up again, but it would not stay
running for long.  This morning, I again reseated everything and the
system booted OK (this time with the suspect DE500 card in) and the
onboard NIC wouldn't connect.  The DE500 would, so I ran that way for
most of 8 hours before the system locked up again.

At this point I have removed the DE500 again and the onboard NIC is
working.  The system has stayed up for about 4 hours as I write this and
I'm hoping this is the end of the matter.
 
I have enabled full POST diagnostics through the BIOS and hunted for
anything in the system logs and found NOTHING.

This is the first time EVER that I've had my XP laptop stay up better
than any of my Linux workstations.

It may just be something else failing on this system -- it's old enough,
but I ran into DE500 weirdness before when I supported Alphas -- with
Alpha Server 1000's, you had to remove any DE500's before you could
successfully apply some firmware updates and then you could reinstall
the NIC's.  (I found that out the hard way, with a panic call to tech
support with a system hung after the "Firmware update in progress, do
not interrupt or power cycle the system" message had appeared...)

Anyone have any ideas as to where I can look for clues as to what might
be causing this workstation to lock up?

Thanks in advance,
-- 
Richard Wilson
r dot wilson (nine) at cox dot net