This is not a complaint, I'm just telling a story.
My Mageia 3 64 bit system crashed today, for the very first time since I upgraded to it back in July. I have rebooted the system a couple of times since July, mostly because some work was being done on the house and the electrical system was offline a few times for long enough that my UPS would not last, so I had to shut the machine down, but other than that it is up 24/7 and until today I have never crashed it, regardless of what I did to it.
I have been doing some work on the embedded ARM processor in an RF modem for a client (new product development), and I have been doing this development in my Windows 7 virtual machine, running in VMWare Workstation, hosted on my Mageia 3 system. I'm doing it in Windows because some of the development environment software is only available in Windows (mainly the software to handle the ICE).
So, I have three connections to this ARM I am working on: A USB connection to an ICE that connects to the JTAG port on the ARM for low-level work on the processor and for uploading programs, a USB connection to a USB/serial adapter that connects to the serial debug console on the ARM board, and an ethernet connection through my LAN to the web-based remote administration software on the ARM. The USB connections are passed through the Mageia host and connected to the Windows 7 VM, and the ethernet connection is routed through IPTables and the VMWare virtual networking environment to the Windows 7 VM.
It has all been working great for the last couple of months. But today, I was exercising a new variant of the program on the ARM and suddenly the Mageia system crossed its eyes and stopped responding. The display went black and I had no control. I tried to ssh in from my Android phone, and that didn't work. So I had no choice but to hit the reset button. *sigh*. I have no idea what happened to it; as is the usual case in such crashes, there was nothing in the logs.
Well, this system had been making a liar of me. I have always said I could kill any system and until today I had not managed to kill this one. My faith in my ability to tear up systems is now somewhat restored.