I'm running the latest KnoppMyth on an old Dell that is acting as both the frontend and the backend. Lately I've been having serious stability problems--it freezes up hard, refusing any local or network input, until I reboot. Unlike any previous crashes I've had, these seem to happen whether or not I'm using the box at the time--I frequently come home to a crashed Myth box.

The last time I had similar problems, it was a damaged hard drive--I booted from a CD, ran fsck on both internal drives, fixed some damage and the problems went away. But that's not the problem this time. I tried fsck and didn't turn up any issues.

I know this is a very vague question, but can anyone recommend other troubleshooting measures I can try? I'm a linux noob, and running fsck is about the limit of my expertise. I'd like at least to figure out where the problem is.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Heat and flaky power supplies are on the top of my list for those pesky tough-to-pin-down problems. Check to make sure all the fans in your system are running properly (CPU, PSU, case, HD, etc.). Be sure to clean out all the dust bunnies you find in there while you have the case open.

Thanks! Aside from just visually inspecting the innards, is there anything I can do to ask the computer whether any of its parts are overheating?

Use mbmon if installed - man mbmon for options, but it's pretty straightforward.

Memory is next on my list. Run the memchk86 (or something very like that) utility.

Also see the Assembly hints here: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=AssemblingTheBox which include some hardware troubleshooting basics.