redhat 9 dies randomly

[Thierry ITTY]

I posted yesterday a question about bad blocks in an xfs file system
to summarize, I have a 1 TB xfs filesystem, and the kernel complains about
unreadable sectors on the HDs. If i run the low-level tools (from western
or maxtor), the disks are ok. when I rebuild the fs, everything is fine (I
do a complete soft scan by dd'ing the whole fs to /dev/null). after a few
days, I get new unreadable sectors errors again.

two things make me think we have the same problem :
- my machine also died unexpectadly (and rebooted due to some configuration
option somewhere), during the last days before I reformated the disks
- the errors (including reboots) seem to occur at moments where the system
load is very high

obviously this is NOT a h/w problem, because I actually have 2 identical
machines which behave the same

also these machines DO be loaded, they provide a 1 TB file space for
nighlty backups, and can have a sustained io load of 20 MB/sec for hours

my current idea is to reduce io speed on disks (either by deactivating
UDMA, just lowering the UDMA level, or forcing it by using 40 wire cables
instead of 80 wires ones)

I'll let you know
Please tell me what you're doing and which results you get

A 20:16 09/08/2004 -0400, vous avez écrit :
>> What exactly do you mean by dying?
>crashing....  stops any processing...
>
>> Try turning off DMA on all your disk drives.  It craps
>> out performance a bit, but if you have/had multiple ide devices and one of
>> them doesn't like DMA it can make your machine just hang.
>
>ok. anything else besides these 2 of?
>CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PCI
>CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA
>
>>
>> Wayner
>
>what about this:
>also is there a way to find out what was the cpu load or memory usage at
>the time of the crash?

			- * - * - * - * - * - * -
Bien sûr que je suis perfectionniste !
Mais ne pourrais-je pas l'être mieux ?
	Thierry ITTY
eMail : Thierry.Itty at Besancon.org		FRANCE