FreeBSD 6.2 Repeating Crash - Sleeping thread; Fatal trap 12: page fault; warning: 'T2' might be used uninitialized - SOLUTION

[Worth Bishop]

We finally determined the root of this problem. One of the system's memory 
modules was apparently going bad. When it failed permanently, the system 
crashed and would not reboot. We swapped out the memory (all Regsistered 
memory) and have not had problems since.

Thanks to the list for the efforts!

WB

(Below is a reply drafted a  long while back - included mostly to thank 
Beto...the rest of it is no longer relevant.)

Thank you very much for your reply, Beto.

I appreciate your point re:  drive age. I only mentioned it because I had
stated the age of the server at 5 years and hoped to forestall suggestions
that an older drive might be likely to have issues. However, I did follow
your suggestion and smartctl reports the drive to be in good health.

I misspoke - we did not upgrade, really, but did a fresh install of 6.1 on
the new drive and manually copied all user files, databases, PERL scripts,
etc. to the new drive. We had been running 4.7 and, since there was not a
direct route for upgrading, we did it the hard way.

Your advice re: copying & renaming GENERIC is well taken - that is, in fact,
exactly what we did. Further, as advised in the manual, we moved it from
/usr/src to a different directory and created a sym link to avoid
inadvertently overwriting it. We did not rename the ident line, but it seems
unlikely that that oversight would prevent the kernel from making.

Were any of the errors described familiar?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Norberto Meijome" <freebsd at meijome.net>
To: "Worth Bishop" <wbishop at twosensemedia.com>
Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 6.2 Repeating Crash - Sleeping thread; Fatal trap 12:
page fault; warning: 'T2' might be used uninitialized


> On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:38:19 -0400
> "Worth Bishop" <wbishop at twosensemedia.com> wrote:
>
>> Addendum: For what it's worth, the 250Gb Samsung drive was added when the
>> system was upgraded - it's only 3-4 months old.
>
> Worth,
> that doesnt mean much - drives can (and do) fail anyway. I suggest you run
> smartctl ( sysutils/smartmontools ) to run tests on your drive and ensure
> you
> don't have any actual problems with it
>
> btw, you don't mention from what version you had upgraded to 6.1. Did you
> do a
> full world upgrade as well as kernel?
>
>
> from your previous email, you ended up having some kernel build problems.
> 1) it is good practise to rename your kernel file (and ident line inside
> it)
> from GENERIC once you've modified it. It makes it obvious to see whether
> you
> are truly running the same GENERIC as everyone else.
>
> 2) make sure you have the latest and proper code for your line of src you
> need
> (eg, -STABLE , or RELEASE-p5 ,etc). You should use cvsup for this. If you
> need
> them, the default config files are in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ .
>
> B
> _________________________
> {Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome
>
> "Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
>  Sam Brown
>
> I speak for myself, not my employer. Contents may be hot. Slippery when
> wet.
> Reading disclaimers makes you go blind. Writing them is worse. You have
> been
> Warned.