[NTLUG:Discuss] writing to a USB drive locks up server..

[terry]

Are we totally sure that writing the large amount of data to USB drive is
causing the lock-up?
Could there be some other [hardware] problem?    Maybe memory?

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Richard <ntlug at rain4us.net> wrote:

> While I've seen my dirvish banks running on reiserfs formatted drives
> get corrupt and lock up a server, I had never seen it with ext2/3
> drives.   I THOUGHT I had just run across an ext2/3 file system
> corruption = server hang but now I'm beginning to wonder.
>
> The dirvish restore to the new server hardware went smooth (and mostly
> without hiccups -- there were a few drivers I had to compile for the new
> SCSI card and nics) and I was looking forward to smooth sailing.
> Unfortunately that hasn't been the case.  I have been having issues on
> this new hardware.  Attempting heavy write access to a USB drive
> containing one of my banks causes the server to lockup.   The file
> system contained errors and since I had a backup copy of the vaults in
> that bank I decided to backup my vault configs and reformat the drive
> fresh.  I had previously reformatted reiserfs filesystems to 'fix'
> corruption that caused lockups and I was surprised that I seemed to have
> the same issue with ext2/3.  When I kicked off a reformat on the dirvish
> bank drive, the server wrote about 147 of it's inode allocations and
> then the server just paused.  At first the server was still pingable,
> but that quickly deteriorated.
>
> The numlock worked but the console was unresponsive.   Use of the Magic
> SysRq commands allowed me to Sync, Unmount and reBoot the server mostly
> gracefully but now I am wondering what technical situations could lead
> to a server hanging on USB disk access.
>
> The Slackware 9.1 w/2.4.20 kernel that is running was stable on the old
> hardware(yes, I know...that was the OLD hardware)...I fear that a kernel
> upgrade will be necessary on this new hardware but I'm hoping someone
> else on the list has seen a problem similar to this one and can offer
> suggestions.  I am not looking forward to dealing with getting an
> upgraded kernel patched , compatible and ready to run
> Dead-Gateway-Detection (DGD), mppe, and uml processes only to find that
> the problem is hardware related, BIOS setting related or some other such
> cause.
>
> Troubleshooting steps taken so far include removing the add-on USB PCI
> card (to solve the NMI errors that were being seen in the log files) and
> disabling SMP in the kernel( so that processes on the server would quit
> going into Un-interruptible sleep mode(D)).
>
> There were no syslog/debug/messages log entries during this latest
> 'lockup during a mke2fs' incident.
>
> What are my next troubleshooting steps?
> Can one surgically upgrade just usb drivers and utilities?
>
> --
> Richard
>
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>



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