From owner-freebsd-hardware Tue Jan 22 13: 1:20 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from wall.polstra.com (wall-gw.polstra.com [206.213.73.130]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 31B4E37B402 for ; Tue, 22 Jan 2002 13:01:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from strings.polstra.com (strings.polstra.com [206.213.73.20]) by wall.polstra.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g0ML1C253470 for ; Tue, 22 Jan 2002 13:01:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jdp@polstra.com) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.5.1 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 13:01:11 -0800 (PST) Organization: Polstra & Co., Inc. From: John Polstra To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Question about a strange hardware problem Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Following up on a question I asked in mid-December: > I've got an intermittent hardware problem on one of the CVSup mirror > sites, and I would appreciate some experienced opinions about > whether it's likely to be in the SCSI controller, the SCSI cable, > the hard drive, or elsewhere. The symptom is that the checkouts.cvs > file which maintains state between CVSup updates occasionally gets > 1-bit errors at random places in it. I haven't seen any similar > errors in the actual content on the mirror; but it is on a different > drive, its access patterns are different, and errors there might be > less noticeable. The errors in checkouts.cvs cause updates to break > until I intervene manually, so I notice those pretty quickly. I moved the offending file to the other disk drive, but after several weeks it once again got a 1-bit error in it. That more or less ruled out the drives as the cause of this problem. I was able to visit the machine today, and I replaced the RAM with new Micron ECC RAM. It turns out the machine had non-ECC RAM in it before. (I didn't build it and couldn't remember what it had installed.) I have a strong feeling this is going to fix the problem. If not, I'll follow up again. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message