VM pager read error

Christopher Black cblack at securecrossing.com
Tue May 24 10:26:05 PDT 2005


Good food for thought.  I'm not using NFS, so there should be no issues
related to dropped packets.  Also, I've never seen the swap being
touched, which makes me doubt the boxes are just running out of
memory.  

Is it possible that cheap hardware or buggy RAM could be causing this,
or is it more likely a software issue?  If it's software, has anyone
seen similar issues with FBSD 5.4?

Thanks,
Chris

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 20:12 +0300, Bigbrother wrote:
> > I have a distributed network of systems running FreeBSD 4.10-Release,
> > and periodically, I see the following errors on the console:
> >
> > vm_fault: pager read error, pid 1 (init)
> 
> I have also a network with many diskless boxes of 4.11 FreeBSD and every now
> and then I see messages like this. 
> The process that dies varies...It is not always (init)..Some times it is
> (mrtg) some times (sshd) or (syslogd) and some other processes that the
> boxes are running.
> 
> 
> I have resolved this situation by running a series of crontab scripts that
> rlogin to every diskless box and checks/restarts every
> service that is critical for that box (e.g. syslogd, cron, sshd...).
> 
> Of course if your (init )dies then you cannot do anything with it and you
> should ask/phone a worker there to do a reboot on that machine. I think the
> problem relies on poor hardware (my network has some low-end network cards).
> 
> It would be nice if we could find any solution to this (without buying new
> cards).
> 
> 
> 
> Perhaps if we could define that some processes would never be swapped out
> (like init) this problem would disappeared, but I
> do not have time for such experiments.
> 
> 
> 
> BB
> 
> 
> p.s. Even though people leave the office, perhaps crontab and periodic
> execute some scripts...So perhaps the machines
> have a high cpu load and some NFS packets are dropped resulting in the
> process to die.
> 
> ---
> Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll
> be warm for the rest of his life 
> 
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-- 
Christopher Black
Chief Security Engineer
Secure Crossing
22750 Woodward Suite 304 - Ferndale, MI 48220
Tel (800) 761-4299 | Direct (248) 658-6120
cblack at securecrossing.com | www.securecrossing.com
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