[WBEL-users] Another filesystem failure

Benjamin Smith lists at benjamindsmith.com
Fri Jul 8 03:13:18 CDT 2005


I don't know to what can be attributed your instabilities. I maintain some 
20-30  Linux servers spread all over the Western United States. I have 
*never* experienced filesystem corruption. HD hardware crashes, yes. Memory 
problems (instable systems) yes. A couple of security compromises, yes. 

And while some servers are lightly loaded, another serves tens of thousands of 
email addresses, over 250,000 emails per day, with almost 4 years of perfect 
uptime, (only planned downtime for security updates) while yet another serves 
over 5 million unique website visits per month (when things are hohum) for 
about the same amount of time. 

But never, ever, have I experienced what you mention below. As far as 
equipment, I tend to buy from gtweb.net or build my own. I usually use 
ValueRAM, and spend money on high quality cooling fans, but I don't 
discriminate for HDD much at all.  

I guess it's most likely that there's a problem with the SATA driver(!?!?) 

-Ben 

On Wednesday 06 July 2005 00:10, Francies Moore wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Whitebox-users mailing list
> Whitebox-users at beau.org
> http://beau.org/mailman/listinfo/whitebox-users
> 

-- 
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978


More information about the Whitebox-users mailing list