I bought an Optiplex 5040, with an i5-6500TE, and 8 GB DDR3L RAM.
When I bought it, I installed Fedora Server on it. It got stuck every few days but I could never see the error. The services just stopped working, I couldn't ssh into it, and connecting it to a monitor showed a black screen.
So, I thought let's install Ubuntu Server, maybe Fedora isn't compatible with all of its hardware. The same thing is happening, now, but I can see this error. Even when there's nothing installed on it, no containers, nothing other than base packages, this happens.
I have updated the bios. I have tried setting nouveau.modeset=0 in the grub config file. I have tried disabling and enabling c-states. No luck till now.
Would really appreciate if anyone helps me with this.
UPDATE:
- I cleaned everything and reapplied the thermal paste. I did not see any change in the thermals. It never goes over 55°C even under full load.
- I reset the motherboard by removing that jumper thing.
- I ran
memtest86, which took over 2½ hours. It did not show any errors. - I ran a CPU stress test for over 15 hours, and nothing crashed.
- I also ran the Dell's diagnostic tool, available in the boot menu of the motherboard. The whole test took over 2 hours but did not show any errors. It tested the memory, CPU, fans, storage drives, etc.
Seen this before, and almost always has to do with hardware failure or bad hardware config.
Reset the BIOS/CMOS jumper on the board, go back into BIOS setup and set the proper time. Do not touch the CPU or Memory timings. Boot with the defaults and see if it still happens. Check and update the BIOS if there is a newer version as well.
Next longer steps: test memory, then stress test the CPU. I'd be shocked if it was a storage issue as I haven't seen that be the culprit, but might was well run the long SMART tests.
Make sure the microcode package is up to date as well
Yeah, always check all of this stuff. Server hardware gets a lot more updates than like gamer board BIOS, companies invest high millions, even low billions in this stuff and they expect problems to be address promptly for that kind of cash.
Check for any peripherals or cards, too. RAID, backplanes, networking cards; drivers, firmware, anything.
Poorly supported hardware will also do this
An Optiplex 5040 should be well and thoroughly supported for 6+y now
I did reset it. It did not help. I ran memtest86 for over 2 hours and did a CPU stress test for over 15 hours. Nothing crashed during the testing.