FreeBSD5.4-Release reboots under disk load - where to start troubleshooting?

Gorski, Jim Jim.Gorski at xerox.com
Fri Sep 30 12:04:07 PDT 2005


Hi all,

 

Long time reader - first time poster.

 

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Short version of the questions:

 

Troubleshooting unlogged resets in FreeBSD5.4 - suggestions?

Is 4.11 a better choice for systems that have shown instability under
5.4?

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Long rambling versions:

 

My system worked flawlessly under Fedora Core 3 and 4, but I have been

recently impressed with the stability and performance of FreeBSD on two

of my older servers (both 5.x) at home.  One of them is at almost eight
months of uptime,

and the last reset was a power outage!

 

Anyhow my problem system ran fine under minimal load for a week.  Using

ports to install Enlightenment, Samba, Evolution - no issues.

 

Copying about 20GB of MP3 to a Samba share caused the system to reboot.

Nothing listed in the system logs, no heat/power problems in the BIOS
and

nothing funny (other than a fsck) when it started up again.

 

This error repeated when using Pan to snag a bunch of binary files from
a newsreader.

 

One minute everything is fine - then black screen and reboot.

 

Unfortunately this failure mangled the root partition, and I was not
skilled enough to

recover the data.

 

I have run memtest and a SMART disk health utility against the system no
errors

The system ran Fedora fine for about a year before the switch to BSD.

 

Last night I installed 5.4 again and installed nothing by a program
called dvdbackup

using the ports collection. First time I tried to backup a DVD, the same
symptom.

 

Tonight I will try FreeBSD4.11, but if I see the same issue I may have
to return to the

Linux installs of my past (sigh).

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Thank you for your insight,

 

Jim Gorski

jim (@t) jimgorski (dt) com

 



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