Best Linux Hardware Diagnostics?

An anonymous reader asks: "I've been running Linux for a little while and usually hardware problems have shown up quite easily - kernel panic, no module, no networking, etc. - but recently I've encountered some problems with network disk access causing very high load, which I think might be hardware related. Under Windows I'd fire up SANDRA or the like and run a full system scan. I did a quick search and nothing really stood out. I was wondering if any Linux gurus out there would like to share their expertise on Linux diagnostics?"

Comments

And SANDRA would have shown nothing

[Gothmolly]

if network access is causing "load" and not "cpu usage", you need to look at kernel stuff - drivers, TCP/UDP windows, ethernet statistics, etc.

Re:If you need to ask....

[JWSmythe]

Aw, come on, the /dev/hd? errors are a pretty good clue the drive is screwed. :)

    We've been doing data center moves this month, and checking/refurbishing every machine as it gets shipped over. I take any /dev/hd? error as "the machine got dropped, and the drive is dead". If it doesn't turn on or it kernel panics for no aparent reason, I consider it a dead motherboard. For most of our machines, that's a fairly good guess, since everything's integrated.

    We have no expectation that any machine will arrive in one piece. The data is already transfered off to a new machine before we put it in a box. Ooohh, the wonders of 0 downtime. :)

    We've been changing every hard drive anyways, because they all have a few years on them. We've only had one machine not turn on, and it's too old to mess with. The only real odd-ball case was one machine on which when we ran ifconfig, it would kernel panic. We're using identical images on every machine to start, and only 1 of 60 has done that, so I'm fairly sure it's a bad motherboard. Too bad, it was a nice dual 1.4Ghz machine. Oh wait, that's old now, isn't it? :)

    We had two drives in an array fail, but that's the TSA's fault. That array was carried on an airplane, to be "sure" it was safe. It had more damage than any other piece of hardware, even the ones that UPS drop-kicked. I'm amazed by some of the damage I've seen. I haven't figured out how they bent some of the metal, since the boxes looked fine, and they were well packed.

    Needless to say, I was knee deep in packing peanuts again tonight.