Problematic computer
Problematic computer
I have been using a company computer running Ubuntu 22.04. There are frequent and unexplained problems, like segmentation faults, stack errors, files disappearing, computer freezing or not booting, or turning off immediately after I turn it on. I don't know what to do. The IT staff came to my office to check the computer and said "it was all good." I am not allowed to boot from a USB stick or enter BIOS or open the case. I ran a command line memory check several times with no errors. There is an NVIDIA card, but it's running X.org and usually headless. I mostly set up tasks via SSH.
What would you do?
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Segmentation and stack errors are most certainly bad memory, I'm 99% sure of it, reboot and run mem test from GRUB if you have the option. The "stack" is the non-dynamically allocated space your program is assigned to run in. Stack errors mean some pointers somewhere are likely getting corrupted and it's trying to access addresses beyond what it's allowed to access.
I can't run memtest unfortunately. The option isn't there and I don't have permission to boot from a USB stick.
If you have root you could theoretically add Memtest86+ to the boot order. There's tools that allow adding boot entries in EFI. You could probably place a Memtest86+ binary in your EFI partition and register it with the EFI firmware. But I'm not suggesting to do it since you could make the machine unbootable and the problem might be on the storage path. I'm just thinking of should be possible.
I can sudo. Last time I looked into this, Memtest86+ version 6 was required to work with UEFI but it wasn't available for Ubuntu 22.04. Now it seems that 24.04 has it, so I might update and see if I can get the test running. Thanks for the suggestion!
You can get the binary from the project's website. Still not suggesting to f around with it.
They should be able to put memtest on the boot partition and then break to an EFI shell on boot and Ioad it manually.
There will be a bit of swearing and googling required but it's doable in a way that doesn't mess with the current boot arrangement.
You could download stressapptest and run that memory benchmark in the normal system.
I'm not sure how well the current version of Memtest does, but when I was overclocking I was told not to use it as it couldn't reliably get memory to crash. (Funny problem to have). The two recommended tools are Windows only, so I found stressapptest as the best alternative.
I did run a similar test and there were no errors detected. Thanks anyway!