[tlug] File Servers from Hell

["A.Sajjad Zaidi" <sajjad@example.com>]

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Im having some really weird problems with a file server and was
wondering if anyone knows what they mean.

The machine is a Duron with 4 IBM IDE drives (all masters), RH6.2 with a
2.4.17 kernel. The drives are running RAID-5. I know IDE dosnt sound
good on a server, but that part has been quite stable and the problem
doesnt seem to be related.

It has been in perfect shape for about 1.5 years and had an uptime of
about 100days before the problem started.

All I did was add a SCSI card and upon rebooting, it became unstable as
hell. It would run fsck (took really long on the 40GB+ data and ext2)
and fail during the RAID sync. Nothing in the logs. No response from
even 'Alt+SysRq'.

The problem persisted upon rebooting and removing the SCSI card. After
that, I shut off Samba and NFSd and everything went well, but died again
when I turned them on.

It has been running fine with Samba after I switched off NFSd altogether,
but died again the same way when I tried to run backups by piping tar
through ssh.

My guess is either a bad mobo(not very likely) or a RAID bug.

Thanks,

Sajjad

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