I asked:
> * Have you tried booting into runlevel 3 and run as much as you know
> how to in text mode? Something involving /dev/urandom, bzip2 and cmp
> might be a good idea.
Dotan Cohen wrote:
> Could you elaborate a bit more on this? I'm araid that my power over
> the command line is very limited. And I'm not exactly a CS major!
Well, how often does the system crash if you just leave it alone in
runlevel 5? It sounds like it's a few times an hour. If so, just leave
it for three hours, and use the uptime command to make sure it hasn't
crashed and rebooted.
I would have suggested something like
[james@kendrick tmp]$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testcase bs=1M count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 3.32386 seconds, 3.2 MB/s
to generate a 10 MB test case,
[james@kendrick tmp]$ bzip2 -k testcase
to bzip2 it (the -k keeps the original),
[james@kendrick tmp]$ bzcat testcase.bz2 > testcase2
[james@kendrick tmp]$ cmp testcase testcase2
to uncompress it to a different file, and to check that the result is
the same as the original.
This ought to exercise the kernel, the processor, and memory. If you use
a large enough testcase, it will exercise disk, as well.
Or, if you've got space, you could just
tar jcf ~/usr.tar.bz2 /usr
to tar up the contents of /usr.
Hope this helps,
James.
--
E-mail address: james | Space Opera: General term for a subgenre of adventure
@westexe.demon.co.uk | SF in which the men are heroic, the women beautiful,
| the monsters monstrous, and the spaceships make
| whooshing sounds in hard vacuum. -- Eric Raymond
