this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
27 points (93.5% liked)
Linux
58632 readers
369 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't know the root of your ills on your server, but I have an interesting story to share (shared by my husband who was an engineer at the company mentioned below).
Back in 1998, the engineers at Be,Inc (who were developing BeOS, a beloved OS at the time) were experiencing kernel panics right after 7 am, on a specific computer. All of the crashes at around the same, while the computer was running tests all night. It had become a big mystery because they couldn't find the bug.
It took them days, but they decided to sit around at 7 am to see what was happening. They saw that a single, strong sun ray was entering the room from the window, and was directly hitting the PC's floppy drive (the PC was not completely closed up with its cover, since it was a test machine). They found that the sun ray would alter some bits in the electronics and what not, and would crash the kernel! :o)
I've got a fun one to share from my college programming professor. Similar situation, they had a machine that kept locking up, and this was back in the days of huge mainframes the size of rooms. So they call the repair tech from the manufacturer.
So the repair tech shows up to the office gets the run down on what's been going on, and goes out to his car and brings in a huge piece of wood and just starts wailing on the thing as hard as he could. The whole office was freaking out thinking this guy had lost it, and he later explained that the memory was a grid of magnetic coils, and the coils would rust and the rust shavings would fall between the coils below, corrupting the memory bits. So he was shaking them loose by slamming the machine with this piece of wood. Lol wild times.
TIL "wailing on something" = hit it with a stick.
Well, I guess after looking it up, its actually 'whaling on something'.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-of-whale-wail-wale
Bit o' the ol' percussive maintenance.
That's a great story, thanks! Old electronics were particularly sensitive to light and other EM disturbance 😄
Still are, though most often it's heat rather than photons from sunlight since it's not really necessary to disassemble hardware to that extent these days. And there's available processing power to retry or do other error handing for any interference. Like running an unshielded Ethernet cable through a wall next to a power cable or through a room with heavy machinery can definitely cause data corruption from EM interference, but it will likely manifest as slowness rather than crashing a whole system. But there are lots of things that still cause computers or applications to crash that are related to stray energy, we just are so used to buggy software now that it rarely is noticed. 😁