One of our dual athlons has serious stability problems. The server crashes randomly, especially when working with large files.

EDIT: Pressed Enter on accident

For example:

I was untarring a serveral tar gz files (same ones) that were over 150mb each, one after another.

They untarred fine the first 6 times. On the seventh time, it returned an error:

tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--format violated
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Then the server went down.

I'm currently using kernel 2.4.9smp which is stable. When I upgrade to newer athlon kernels, these nightmares start to happen. even when I try to install the i686 version of the kernel, the rpm gives me a whole slew of errors.

how much ram do you have? You might have an instability (hardware wise) or compatibility issue. We've encountered some really goofy effects with the tyan mpx motherboards, that limit our use (with linux). I'm not sure if its just a incompatibility in mp mode versus the chipset, or hardware. I'm gonna plop some nice pc2700 that I know is rock solid in.

Please give us more details about your hardware, including dmesg if possible.

Output from dmesg http://www.acunett.com/dmesg.txt

Motherboard: CHAINTECH 7KDD AMD Server Motherboard 762+768
WD HD
Micron 512MB DDR ECC PC2100 Ram