Machine freezes frequently (nfs issue?)

It does seem though, that nfs activity is more "successful" in triggering this problem. But If I can remember correctly, it is not always necessary.

Have you done a memory test? Also can you watch the system monitor to see if any process is going to 100%?

Best Regards,
Williamts99

Will, thank you very much for picking this up (Dankeschön!).

Trying to pinpoint the problem, I mounted the directory usually exported via NFS by sshfs now and unfortunately ran into the same trouble. To rule out hardware problems, I booted into a Knoppix Live CD. And indeed, I copied large amounts of files without any hang-ups ever. So I guess that this is after all a bug or possibly an issue with my installation.

I have not yet done a memory check but it looks like the hardware is OK since Knoppix runs fine. I will do a memory test, nonetheless to be sure. Thanks for pointing out that (quite obvious, duh) possibility of analysis.

memory test ran for 2,5 hours without any problems. It passed tests five times.

Would you be interested in testing this out on Feisty to see if you have the same issue? It's still in testing, but is planned for release in a couple of weeks.

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing

Best Regards,
Williamts99

I think it is not the best idea to update when you ran into trouble from updating. I cannot get to my computer right now since it is about 10.000km away and I cannot log into it because of course it crashed shortly after I left it.

That of course is your decision. Could you describe the method that you used to upgrade? What all applications did you install and method of installation? Also, could you post a copy of your sources.list file.

Best Regards,
Williamts99

No particular method. Just aptitude. I can answer the rest of your questions only after getting back home.

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

I found out by chance that this was caused by the same buggy dash as another hard-to-track problem I was having on my laptop. Making sure that /bin/sh points to bash and not dash apparently made the problems go away. The machine has been running and performing tasks that previously crashed it for sure during the last 36 hours or so. Before this "dpkg-reconfigure dash" it would not last 15 minutes.

sources.list only contains official ubuntu repos. I cannot completely rule out having ever installed a 3rd party package on this (or any other) machine.