Debian Squeeze on Pogoplug Pink: Sudden Segmentation Faults

I had been running Debian Squeeze on my pink Pogoplug since 2011 quite happily. Occasionally, for no reason that I could see, a 'lockup' would occur, and my solution was typically to force a power-down, remove my USB stick, run 'fsck' repairs required, plug back in, and reboot. I learned that some USB brands were more resilient than others. Yes, a bit tedious at times but mostly amazing to watch my 4 watt wonder webserver...

Then, about 2 weeks ago, something weird happened. Some of the programs were failing with 'segmentation faults'. I suspected that maybe the binaries had been corrupted by USB stick errors -- but 'fsck' told me that everything was clean! I had no idea what to do, and didn't want to run in circles for days, so I did an emergency transfer of my webserver environment to an old Fujitsu laptop (slower benchmarks than the Pogoplug!). So far it is working fine in its new role...

So now I don't know what to do next with my Pogoplug. How can I avoid this mystery 'segmentation fault' failure in the future? Should I avoid USB sticks and use portable USB hard drives instead? Should I use the new 'wheezy' scripts and start over again?

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored cat.

Do you have swap enabled?

I was seeing seg faults on my debian wheezy when using deluge (torrent client), adding a 256MB swap solved everything.

here's a small script I saw that enables swap on another drive:

# Disable all existing swap
swapoff -a
# Pre-allocate the space to use as the swap file. The example below
#  creates a 256MB swap file on the mounted drive (count=256x1024).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/somedrive/swapfile bs=1024 count=262144
# If creating the file was successful, enable the swap file now.
if [ -f /media/seagate/swapfile ]; then
        mkswap /mnt/somedrive/swapfile
        swapon /mnt/somedrive/swapfile
fi

Thanks for the suggestion! In my case, though, I wonder why it would spontaneously start happening with no (apparent) changes in my usage? Hmmm...

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored cat.