System hanging at boot

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On 30 May 2003, at 3:18pm, cfarinella at appropriatesolutions.com wrote:
> I tried to restart the machine and it hangs at:
> 
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 240k

  What have you changed since you last successfully booted the machine?

  You might try running a memory diagnostic.  MemTest86 is very nice, and
free.  <http://www.memtest86.com>

> Searching the web leads to references to rebuilding the kernel ...

  Rebuilding the kernel... for what reason?

> What are the ramifications of running the RH 9 upgrade?  We have a number
> of Perl apps running on it, custom Apache/mod_perl etc., I'm afraid a
> bunch of stuff will be broken.

  I'd strongly recommend against upgrading from RHL 7.x to RHL 9 in that
case.  RHL 8.0 switched to Apache 2.x, which was a major upgrade, and broke
a *lot* of stuff.  From what I've read, fixing things generally doesn't need
a major overhaul, but rather a lot of small changes, but that is still
something you do not want to do on a production machine.

  What makes you think installing RHL 9 would solve the problem, anyway?

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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