If you have a mysterious problem with a Linux box, try bashing your system with sys_basher

“Finally, Eric loaded up a neat little program called
sys_basher, which exercises all the elements of the
system…hard. It puts the machine under a strong load and if
something can’t handle the load, it’ll die. Quickly.

As it turned out, the problem was a hard drive. The weird thing
is, we hadn’t allocated the hard drive in the Linux environment
yet. It was simply plugged in, awaiting configuration. But, when
that hard drive was plugged in, sys_basher would take the system
down almost instantly. When the hard drive was unplugged, the
system would run rock solid.

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