debian has gone insane

generalmiaow

hello
I thought this might be a good place to start asking questions. I have a small debian computer running on a CF card that acts as a firewall for my house, and recently, it went insane. I don't know if these problems are connected, but here are the symptoms.

1. Erratic slowness when typing in a shell. I noticed this when sshing in from work, and I thought it was network slowness, so I rebooted, waited, tried from home and it was still slow. "top" reveals nothing strange. I recently apt-got smbfs and smbclient, but even after uninstalling them, I still get the periodic pauses.

2. I finally plugged in a monitor, and to my surprise it's randomly turning on and off. It doesn't appear to do this when there's no OS running (e.g. in bios setup) so it doesn't appear to be hardware. It never did this before 4 days ago.

Anyone have any idea where I should start troubleshooting with this?

generalmiaow

well, I took the damn thing apart and put it back together and now the monitor has stopped going nuts. some things will never make sense.

still getting the problem with erratic pauses though. now that I have a monitor, I've noticed this only happens over SSH. Here's an example... if I hold down a key while at the prompt, every 2 or so seconds it'll stop responding for half a second. Imagine typing on a spyware ridden XP machine. it feels like low memory or something, but I can't see any greedy processes

generalmiaow

ooh, here's another hint. I can SSH to my mac mini through the debian box, and I get the same effect while typing on my mac mini's shell!

humbert

I'm no expert by any means, but could it be some device malfunctioning and the kernel stalling while it waits on an I/O routine to return for example?

bushy...

Could be cf , is stuff that gets written to often mounted on a ramdisk ? or dodgy ethernet port ( I nearly binned a little embedded board over a switch that would loose packets on 192 addresses)