scanning for bad ram

[Kuba Ober]

On Tuesday 06 November 2007, Paul A wrote:
> Nick, thanks for the information.
>
> The reason I'm asking is because we have 3 1900's bought refurbished and
> one application is exiting with status 11 (SIGSEGV) on two of the servers.
> The provider of the software tells me it's probably due to hardware or ram
> failure.
>
> Can run osma and test the ram hardware while the server is up, will it
> affect data stored in memory. I can always take one of the servers I'm
> testing offline if it does.

To do proper RAM testing in an on-line system requires kernel support (kernel 
pages need to be moved around in physical memory for the duration of the 
test). I don't know that such a thing exists, or if it's used by OMSA.

The only sane way to test RAM is by booting with memtest86. There are really 
no alternatives.

Cheers, Kuba