From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 29 12:49:03 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 056C337B401 for ; Thu, 29 May 2003 12:49:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.gmx.net (imap.gmx.net [213.165.65.60]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D873543F93 for ; Thu, 29 May 2003 12:49:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from blueeskimo@gmx.net) Received: (qmail 29229 invoked by uid 65534); 29 May 2003 19:49:00 -0000 Received: from i216-58-29-174.gta.igs.net (EHLO [216.58.29.174]) (216.58.29.174) by mail.gmx.net (mp005) with SMTP; 29 May 2003 21:49:00 +0200 From: Adam To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain Organization: Message-Id: <1054237740.6736.12.camel@jake> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.4 Date: 29 May 2003 15:49:00 -0400 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: What caused my box to die? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 19:49:03 -0000 Well, I'm just about done rebuilding my box after a major crash and burn. Now that things are slowing down, I'd like to get some input on what might have caused the crash. I'm wondering if I stumbled on some obscure bug, or maybe a known bug that hasn't ever been fixed. Let me describe the scenario before and after the crash: I had 3 machines on my LAN at the time. The network config is simple: DSL Modem --> Gateway (also my workstation) --> Switch --> Laptop and test machine My gateway was running FreeBSD 4.7. Just before the crash, I was copying movies via FTP from the gateway to the laptop. At the same time, I was copying a single movie from the test machine to the gateway. I looked over at the test machine and noticed the transfer had died, and tried to reestablish connection with the gateway. The LAN link was dead on both the test machine and the laptop, which I found to be extremely strange (this had never happened before). So, I went over to the gateway (which was still running), and I decided to check to see if the gateway was even on the internet. I typed 'ping ftp.cdrom.com' and pressed Enter. IMMEDIATELY after I pressed Enter, the box completely froze up. I waited about 60 seconds to see if it would unfreeze, but it was no use. I hard reset the box, and upon reboot the machine was unable to boot from /. In addition, several of my partitions on ad0 were completely hosed. At this point I got pissed off and just powered down all machines and decided to wait until the next morning to mess with fixing anything. However, the next morning, the test machine wouldn't even turn on. This is the 2nd time its done that, so I have a feeling it's just a bad coincidence. After removing the internal cables and plugging them back in, the machine started back up and worked fine. The only change to the machine that I can think of is I added 1gb of Kingston Value RAM to the box a few days prior. However, the RAM had been working perfectly for a few days before the crash, and for a few days since I rebuilt the machine. Is there a port to thoroughly examine the RAM and make sure its OK? The fact that I had 2 large file transfers going at the time of the problem really seems strange to me, because thats the first time I had even done that with this gateway (the laptop is brand new). Perhaps something went wrong with my ipf/ipnat? Anyhow, if you took the time to read this entire message and have some theories, I'm all ears. I'd like to do whatever I can to avoid this problem in the future. I'm now running FreeBSD 4.8 on the box with a custom kernel. Seems to be working perfectly. Thanks. -- Adam