Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 12:30:39 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: Sonja Jo Krenz-Bush <begonia@itchy.serv.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: help! system crashing 2-4 times a day with vinvalbuf - flush failed Message-ID: <199609251930.MAA06910@root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Sep 1996 12:03:20 PDT." <Pine.BSD.3.91.960925114814.1777A-100000@itchy.serv.net>
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>Our server, which had been running fine for the last 7 months started >crashing 2-4 times a day this week. Today, I finally managed to see the >error message echoed to the console (or part of it). > >It said: > >vinvalbuf - flush failed > >We're running FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE. This system serves as web server and >shell access server. Usually around 6-10 people logged on, most of them >reading mail and/or news. > >Things I have noticed - we've had some unkillable processes that were >mail related - ie, /usr/bin/mail, pine, RMAIL, etc... Crashes seem to >happen when something like this is going on. In the past, this had >happened occascionally but never crashed the system. > >Things that have changed: our /usr/spool/mail is NFS mounted from the mail >server. Earlier this week, the drive on the mail server started giving us >problems so we replaced it. The mail server itself isn't having any >problems since we replaced the disk and is running FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE. It's almost a sure bet that NFS is the cause, although I don't know precisely what would trigger something like this. NFS doesn't do any vnode locking, so it's easy to imagine how new buffers could get attached during a flush (causing the panic). >Is this something that is fixed in 2.1.5R? Let me know if I need to give >additional information - I'm not the person who primarily does this but >wanted to get started on figuring this out right away. If the cause is what I think it is, not likely. -DG David Greenman Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project
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