failure - write_dma issue

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 6, 2012, at 10:03 AM, John Almberg wrote:
> My FreeBSD servers have been quite reliable since I started using them 4 or 5 years ago, so I don't have much experience debugging them.
> 
> Can anyone give me a hint about what might be wrong (I assume with the HD), and how/if it might be fixable?

That's a typical sign of a disk failure.  Whether it is just a bad sector, or whether the entire drive is toast is the question, and the smartctl utility from sysutils/smartmontools port will let you take a look and run drive self-tests to help answer it.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck