Dying machine?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I wonder if this machine is running on anything stronger than a wing and
a prayer, and I would like some advice from someone more knowlegable than
me.

It's a fire-sale 3b1, running continuously since I bought it a couple years
ago.

A month ago, I heard noises that sounded like the drive going weird, but
the noises went away.  It did get me to back up in a big hurry, though.

For a while, not too clear in my mind, I've been having the system freeze
on me about once a week.  It's odd, too: typically, I haven't used the
system for a while, I sit down and break into the screen saver okay, and
the system seems to track the mouse.  The keyboard may or may not be
dead, depending, but I can generally point and click (yes, the UA is
usually around).  I get a little bit of disk activity, but that grinds
to a halt, and the system just stares at me until I reboot it.  I'm running
3.51 with the fixdisk kernel, and I know this thing used to stay up
nearly forever.

I didn't worry about it too much though; the crashes weren't getting
any more frequent.

Then, I was getting ready for Xmas, and decided that since this thing
sits with its back to the common areas in my house, that I would clean
up the cabling a bit.  I had the power off for several hours while I
did this.  It took me a large number of tries to get it running after
that interval.

This was not the sticktion disk troubles that others have reported: I
could hear the disk spinning up.  At first, the screen showed a pattern
that looked like a rectangular spider web with a couple of random
mouse tracks running across at two places.  A reboot got to the normal
screen test-pattern and then a permanently blank screen.  Several more
reboots got further and further.  Another got to UNIX, with crashes
within the first few minutes.  Finally, after power had been on for
30 or more minutes, I got a reboot that seemed to be stable.  Then a
bit later, I got the first honest-to-goodness kernel panic I've seen
in years.  Eventually, it got stable, and has been running without
crash for about a week.

Sounds to me as if something's temperature sensitive, and likes to be
hot.

Anybody have any ideas about how I could go about finding out what it
really is?  I would like to just chuck the part, whatever it is that's
doing this.  I'm pretty handy with tools, though I don't have more than
a soldering kit, multimeter, and the usual pliers and things.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman ( kevin at kosman.UUCP, {pyramid,csun}!srhqla!kosman!kevin )
voice: 805-984-8042 Vital Computer Systems, 5115 Beachcomber, Oxnard, CA  93035
Non-Disclaimer: my boss is me, and he stands behind everything I say.