[WBEL-users] Another filesystem failure

[Francies Moore]

Hi everyone

First of all apologies for not thanking those who replied to my posting 
re Gig ethernet cards.  We have not got any further with that, so I have 
nothing to report.

But ... yesterday my main White Box/Lotus Domino server failed at 5.02 
am.  It took an engineer all day to retrieve Domino and get it back 
running.  It has two Maxstor SATA drives and he has managed to get the 
whole system back up on the drive that still works..  Unfortunately I do 
not have copies of the error messages at home here, but basically it was 
coming up with Sense Key errors, Drive_Seek errors and ext3 fs errors.  
Maxstor diagnostics when run said the disk (the disk with all the 
data!!!) was bad.  However, later on Maxstor helpline said that it was 
an OS/fs error and the disk needed to be low level formatted and then 
would be OK.

For myself I never trust a disk again but always replace it.  However, I 
do not have the final say in this instance.

I have been here before with my other IDE disk based WBEL3.0 server - 
previous postings to this list in April/May.  Once the bad disks were 
low level formatted off-site I am told they are now still running, but I 
replaced them and rebuilt the server from scratch..

Is there an issue with WBEL 3.0 Respin 1 and Maxstor disks or SATA?  
This Domino/WBEL system ran for a year but died about 6 weeks ago with 
bad RAM, which was replaced and the server brought back up.

I have turned off updates as I do not want to upset Domino, so this 
cannot be the issue.  This machine is on a UPS so mains power is not the 
issue.

I am seriously concerned as I thought Linux was stable - the issues I 
have had with my home machines have been hardware (dead HD, bad RAM) 
except one time when a dual boot Win98/WBEL system found ext2 fs errors 
on startup, fixed by fsck, but we are beginning to wonder if we should 
go back to Windows on our production servers. I don't want to!!

Any suggestion as to what is happening to my servers would be appreciated.

PS I have been running RedHat 8 for over 2 years with Samba and Apache 
on a box built out of bits and it just runs and runs....

Thanks.

Francies Moore