FC5 - recently introduced system hangs, multiple systems

[Phil Meyer]

Chris Lidgate wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First off sorry for the long post, but I want to try and get everything
> down systematically.
>
> [snip]
>
> 2) A couple of weeks ago I needed to re-build my work laptop. Having had
> such a good experience with the desktop, I decided to put FC 5 onto the
> laptop. The installation was completed again with Gnome and Kde and some
> other stuff. then I ran yum update and updated ~200 packages on the
> system. I think the kernel loaded by yum update was 2.6.18-1.2200.
[snip]

On the laptop, gnome has allot of setting for power management.  It is 
likely that every time you close the lid it tries to suspend.

Check: system/preferences/more preferences/power management

Turn off all power management until you are satisfied that the problems 
are over.

Most of the later FC5 kernels had specific troubles with that.

Also, yenta, which controls PCMCIA connections to the sd driver and 
other things, was broken through kernels > 2133 on FC5.

Fedora moves very fast.  For a stable system you have to watch the 
mailing list pretty closely for kernel destabilization issues that 
affect your particular hardware.

Quite often the RedHat folks will toss in a patch that totally breaks 
other things that are stable in the upstream kernel.  This is normal here.

What I do, is press along until I get the level of stability that suits 
my application mix, and then I freeze the system.  Meaning that I don't 
update any more.

Then I continue to test and update regularly on non critical systems, 
follow this mailing list, watch the kernel bug tracker, and when the 
next relatively stable period hits, I upgrade all my systems.

Having said that, I should point out that my gaming machine and my work 
laptop are both FC6.  My laptop gets updated quite frequently, and 
backed up often. :)  I am willing to rebuild it any time.

My game machine at home lags behind the laptop until I can prove 
stability for the things I use it for.

My production servers are currently at FC5 kernel 2133 and won't move to 
FC6 until I am comfortable.  That may happen over this holiday season, I 
hope.  The battery of tests that I recently ran on exact match test 
hardware were successful on FC6 kernel 2798.

You may also be interested to know that one production system is still 
running FC3 because it is a dedicated web server, print server, misc 
server and it simply does not need an upgrade.  When the hardware 
changes on that server is when the OS will get an update.