Server Crash... Bad Memory

I've spent about three hours checking and sorting out the machine which went down, and come-what may I found problem after problem, but not with any of the software.  If your software checks out then there's an obvious other place to look... Your hardware.

My first step was to remove the drives, specifically my ZFS devices.  No difference, everything still broke.

I then set about systematically removing one piece of hardware at a time, first my quad ethernet card, no difference, then I removed the added dual SATA card still broke...

Finally, I removed all the memory and inserted just one stick...

For the first time the firmware of the motherboard reported something had changed (at boot) it knew the memory has reduced from 8GB to 2GB.  But then the grub boot was really fast, it came up and into the system very quickly.

Now, I had been getting MySQL Error 2013 for nearly ever query or SQL dump, with 2GB of RAM this didn't happen, sudo and all the programs now work again... I can therefore only assume one of the other sticks of RAM is corrupt in some manner.

So with a clean boot...

I was able to start pulling the data out...

I ran the server on soak in memtest for an hour and still no problem, there was ONLY a problem after MySQLd had started and 8GB of RAM was installed... Time to bin some of these sticks.

Development : Visual Studio Giving False Reports of Missing Symbols

I have just run across an issue which has me slightly baffled... Sending the build down to my automated server and it started coming back as failed, panic ensued, so that I started to then do builds on my local Visual Studio instance... (which is VS2013). 

Now, this code is perfectly working, has been fine, released and tested for... Since about 2011.

This is how the error shows up...

Taking a closer look...

We can see there are suddenly a bunch of unresolved externals, specifically the definitions of a bunch of functions.

There is NOTHING wrong with this code, indeed, the work around to get a build to complete is to comment out any one of these functions....

Rebuild, and it now fails on that specifically missing function body.

Finally, re-enable the code and do a further rebuild... and everything completes perfectly...

Consulting the internet about this one, as everyone here has drawn a blank, and one person suggests that this is a miss-match between the Byte set setting of the project (Multi-byte) and any libraries being Unicode.  However, I have no third party libraries... The mystery only deepens.

A full fresh check out of the code, still fails, a full clean fails, a rebuild fails, rebooting the machine has failed.  None of the fixes has made a difference, and more problematic is that the failure happens sporadically.