Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 14:17:37 -0400 From: Matthew Hagerty <matthew@digitalstratum.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Crash without Errors, Warnings, or Panics Message-ID: <443E95C1.4030404@digitalstratum.com>
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Greetings, I'm running 6.0-RELEASE-p5 on a Toshiba built server: dual Xeon Intel motherboard with a LSILogic MegaRAID (amr0) controller. This machine has been running for about 2 years now, and was very stable until I updated from 5.3 to 5.4, and now 6.0. The crashing seems to be totally random and I have had it crash in as little as 12 hours and as long as 143 days. When the box goes down it does so in a strange way. First, it still responds to network probes like ping (usually), however, all console access is ignored. Also, some network ports still respond, like a telnet to port 22 to test SSH will yield an SSH banner, but trying to connect with SSH just hangs. Sometimes this is also true of the SMTP server, but not always. This also makes it impossible for me to use CARP to swap to the recently purchased spare machine, since the network interface is generally still responding so CARP does not detect a problem. My biggest problem with this is that there are *never* any console messages or log entries in any logs, no warnings about disk failure, buffer exhaustion, system failures, etc.. The machine simply seems to stop responding and the only way to correct the problem is a hard reboot. A strange thing did happen yesterday though, I believe I caught the box on the verge of failure. I was SSH'd in and did a ps to check things out. There were about 100 of these entries: 55050 ?? D 0:00.00 postmaster: ipa ipa ::1(63061) startup (postgres) The box runs a web-based app and connects to a local Postgres DB which seemed to be unable to start new connections being requested by the PHP scripts. At any rate, I stopped Apache and then tried to stop Postgres which resulted in (or just happened to coincide with) the box locking up and no longer responding to my SSH commands or attempts to reconnect with SSH. I hardly think this is a Postgres problem, but even if it was, a userland app should *not* be able to bring down a box... Can anyone shed some light on this, give me some options to try? What happened to kernel panics and such when there were serious errors going on? The only glimmer of information I have is that *one* time there was an error on the console about there not being any RAID controller available. I did purchase a spare controller and I'm about to swap it out and see if it helps, but for some reason I doubt it. If a controller like that was failing, I would certainly hope to see some serious error messages or panics going on. I have been running FreeBSD since version 1.01 and have never had a box so unstable in the last 12 or so years, especially one that is supposed to be "server" quality instead of the make-shift ones I put together with desktop hardware. And last, I'm getting sick of my Linux admin friends telling me "told you so! should have run Linux...", please give me something to stick in their pie holes! Thanks, Matthew
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