Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:29:24 -0600 From: "Joseph Koenig (jWeb)" <joe@jwebmedia.com> To: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: Henry Miller <hmiller@intradyn.com> Subject: Re: Hardware or OS problem? Message-ID: <BE02B574.15688%joe@jwebmedia.com> In-Reply-To: <200501050933370399.9889C69A@mail.intradyn.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> On 1/5/2005 at 09:14 Joseph Koenig (jWeb) wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> We have a system that is currently giving us some trouble. The system > is >> FreeBSD 4.9. It's a 2 GHz system with 1MB RAM and (here's the kicker) > 73GB >> RAID 1 ATA drives. The system serves as a web/database server > dedicated to >> 1 >> site. Daily the system goes out and downloads real estate listings > (via >> shell scripts and cURL) and processes them (via PHP into MySQL). Also, >> nightly the system downloads a zipped set of images (probably around >> 400-500) and processes them into thumbnails (PHP scripts calling >> ImageMagick). Over the last week or two, the system is crashing and >> rebooting into single user mode. It's not consistently during updates, > or >> resizing of images, or anything like that. Yesterday, it crashed with > 99% >> processor idle and load averages of 0.00 0.00 0.00 -- I was watching a >> 'top' >> when the machine died. When it boots into single user mode, an fsck > must be >> run, which identified a few corrupt JPEG files -- however, the > sysadmin who >> reboots it never tells me which files they are. The sysadmin is > convinced >> it >> is a FreeBSD problem and says that Linux will not crash because of a >> corrupt >> file and if it does, will not boot into single user mode and he will > be >> able >> to access it remotely to do the fsck. About 3-4 weeks ago, one of the >> drives >> in the mirror set crashed and had to be replaced. I'm not convinced > that >> drives are not to blame for these issues. Is there any way to verify > that? >> Is it possible a corrupt JPEG on the drive could cause the system to > crash >> randomly? What can I do to correctly identify the problem so that we > can >> fix >> it and not change the OS? Thanks, > > The sysadmin has no clue about either linux or freebsd! > > A corrupt JPEG cannot cause a crash of the OS, for any real OS. (If it > does, it is a bug in the OS, but I doubt one exists) Real OS includes > Windows XP, linux, and FreeBSD. > > However, an OS crash can cause a corrupt JPEG! > > Either linux or FreeBSD may boot into single user mode when the > filesystem is corrupt. What your sysadmin means is that with one of > the newer filesystems Linux uses journeling, which is much less likely > to enter this situation, but it still can happen. With soft updates > FreeBSD is in the same situation as linux, but softupdates is > (generally, there are exceptions) better than journeling. There is > softupdates in Freebsd 4.9, but I'm not sure how to enable it, or how > good it is. (in 5.3 it is awesome!) > > I suspect hardware. > > I'd burn memtest to a CD, and run that for a few hours to see if > something is identified. Memtest won't catch everything, but it does > a pretty good job. > > Also look at other factors. Does the HVAC kick in when this happens? > Is someone hitting the panic stop switch? Situations like that have > happened, and they can take a while to debug. They are not likely, but > don't rule them out. > > FreeBSD 4.9 is fairly old at this point. You should seriously > consider upgrading to 4.11 (due out in a few weeks), or 5.3 (my > recommendation, but a much more involved upgrade). > In addition, to the original problem stated above, we are seeing a number of problems like "...in free(): warning: modified (page-) pointer" and "...in free(): warning: chunk is already free". I have them admin running a memtest today, but wanted to make sure these errors were not indicative of something else going on. Thanks, Joe Koenig Production Manager jWeb New Media Design joe@jWebmedia.com http://www.jwebmedia.com/ 636.928.3162
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?BE02B574.15688%joe>