[WBEL-users] Another filesystem failure

[Scott Silva]

Francies Moore spake the following on 7/6/2005 12:10 AM:
> 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
Have you considered adding a second drive as a raid mirror drive?
That way if one drive fails, the system will disconnect that failed
drive and happily continue.


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