Compaq 1850R freezing, controller issues?

[Gerald]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Gerald wrote:

> Saturday when it froze last I setup 2 displays running commands since it
> appeared to keep running to the monitor after it would die to all else.
> One was running top -ores (since mrtg was pointing around memory) and the
> other was running systat -vm 5. When it froze today, there were about 15
> processes in State: inode running at priority -14. They weren't all
> sendmail either. snmpd, radiator (just for accounting), and sendmail were
> running at -14. The top process and other processes were still running but
> all services had died again and I couldn't pull it out of the coma
> without hitting the power button...again.

This machine died again Wed night at 9 PM. I had already installed kernel
sans SMP but not booted to it yet so I'll see how long that goes. If we
make it past tonight, I'll know if that resolved the issue for certain
after this weekend.

The biggest clue thus far in my problem on this machine has been when I
left a top running on the console. When it freezes, the processes are
still alive but sleeping in "STATE: inode". This was not one process in
such state but 80% of the processes that were still on the screen. Most of
those processes had a Priority of -14. I don't know UFS or the kernel
source code well enough to know what problem a ton of processes waiting
for "inode" would indicate, but I know what an inode is. I have plenty
free, and a lack of response from the disk or RAID array would leave the
kernel waiting for some type of inode information.

Can someone shed some light on what this alone might indicate? Could it be
RAID controller OR a hard drive flaking? Would something (the kernel)
missing an interrupt from something else (a disk or RAID card) cause this?

How can I debug this information and find out why it was waiting for
inodes? Can someone even clarify what a process in STATE: inode means
literally. (reading/writing/both/taking inventory,requesting inode information)

Gerald