Subject: developer.pgadmin.org/nagios.pgadmin.org - Disk failure

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 22:47:52 +0100

The machine hosting the developer.pgadmin.org and nagios.pgadmin.org
vservers is currently having serious filesystem problems, which are
causing disk intensive operations (like rsync, tar) to segfault for
currently unknown reasons. If you commit to the pgAdmin SVN, please hold
off for a while, or if you are working on other projects on the machine,
please don't for now!

If anyone has any idea what might cause ReiserFS to die horribly like
this, whilst the RAID1 disks don't so much as squeak in the wrong way,
I'd love to hear it!!

Anyhoo, I have backups, and a replacement machine sitting in the wings
so I should be able to get things sorted early next week.

Regards, Dave

---

From: Travis Hein <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 22:04:54 -0400

I used to have a pair of old SCSI drives, in software RAID1. I never used 
reiserfs, it was ext2 of the day. It worked great for most of the time, 
except when I did backups, where there was more bus or bulk activity. At 
first I went nuts thinking the scsi tape drive was badly terminated or 
wreaking havoc on the bus, but then I found the same problem happened with 
network backups and backups to IDE drive.
The issue was the kernel scsi card driver was using tag command queueing, but 
one of my drives didn't know what to do with those, whilst the other drive 
did support tag command queueing. I am not a scsi scientist, but my best 
theory was that there was some evil eventual something breaking under the 
high loads because of the different TCQ support, and the software RAID1 
didn't know what to do then.
I never did fix it, i moved to new hardware and abandoned the system all 
together.

Well, sorry to hear things are funny there, and it is probably not related to 
my colorful ranting.

But I have some space you can borrow to stuff things on, if it is helpful.

$>df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             337G  196G  141G  59% /
/dev/sdb1             231G  184G   48G  80% /mnt/backup

/ the 141G is 6 element RAID 5 on ext3, with rsync backup to the /mnt/backup, 
which is a usb drive, but it works :)

let me know if there is anything I can do.

On Friday 12 May 2006 17:47, Dave Page wrote:
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-- 
Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.