[mythtv-users] Sudden massive problems - SOLVED

[Rod Smith]

On Saturday 03 February 2007 22:00, Rod Smith wrote:
> On Saturday 03 February 2007 21:15, Brian Wood wrote:
>
> > and start testing your system to see if you have a hardware problem
> > there. You might have a failing hard drive, a failing power supply,
> > bad RAM - it could really be anything. You just have to start
> > eliminating things one by one.
>
> I don't think it's a hardware problem.

We were both right. It turns out my swap space had been deactivated when I'd 
been mucking about with things and reformatted the swap partition -- Ubuntu's 
installer used some sort of serial number to refer to the swap partition 
rather than a Linux partition identifier, so when I rebooted I had no swap 
space. This caused the frontend and/or backend to run out of memory and crash 
(I've only got 256MB on this system, but I realize that's inadequate and so 
plan to increase it in the near future). So it was a software (configuration) 
problem that relates to hardware (memory).

Thanks for your help. With any luck my embarrassing oversight will help 
somebody else sometime down the road....

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com