Diagnosing defective RAM

All server and computing components can and will fail eventually, but there are a few pieces of hardware that seem to fail more often than others. Fans, power supplies, and hard disks definitely make the list of common things administrators will end up replacing, but defective memory is also a situation I'm sure you'll run into eventually.

Although memory sticks becoming defective is something that could happen, I talk it is left to last in this chapter because it's one of those situations where I can't give you a definite list of symptoms to look out for that will point to memory being the source of an issue you may be experiencing. RAM issues are very mysterious in nature, and each time I've run into one, I've always stumbled across memory being bad only after troubleshooting everything else. It's for this reason that nowadays I'll often test the memory on a server or workstation first, since it's very easy to do. Even...