rbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hello!
I'm experiencing a very weird situation with FC1.
I have this machine that was upgraded from RH9 to FC1, using yum. Everything worked fine, no problem there. When running RH9, this machine was rock solid and only rebooted for kernel updates. But with FC1, the problems began.
The machine completely hangs, with no apparent reason whatsoever, at no specific time. I tried lots of kernels.. my usual custom vanilla+grsec and RH9's 2.4.18 and Fedora's latest NPTL kernel. That appears to make no difference. However, there was this occasion when i noticed the machine hanged two days in a row at exactly the same time, when running cron.daily (updatedb?!). But i never got to reproduce that sistematically. Yesterday i stressed tested it with a full backup (tar+gzip) and kernel compilations at the same time. Went great. Then i went to bed, to find in the morning it crashed around 30mins after that test, when idle.. I can have a week uptime, or 3 hangs in a day, depends on it's mood. The machine does pretty much the same thing all the time: mail and web, nothing fancy and nothing else.
The hardware is a Tyan 1U rackmount, 2.4 P4, 1GB DDR, two 120GB IDE disks in RAID1 (Promise FastTrack controller onboard). Hardware worked before for months, no problem. All fans ok, so overheating does not seem like a possibility. The only changed variable is the upgrade from RH9 to FC1. However, same behaviour with very different kernels, that also confuses me. Some quirk with glibc maybe?
Anyone here experiencing something similar? Any thoughts? Before i switch back to RH9 and see if it helps..
Thanks in advance
Promise Fastrack RAID is your culprit.
Forget using any parallel ATA RAID product made from Promise with Linux. I've been round and round this subject, and the best they give you is source code, but how can you build the source when there's no drive recognized. I recommend going to 3WARE for any ATA RAID (SATA or parallel) with Linux.
I hear that Promise SATA is supported in the kernel by default, but if you've got what I think you've got, you're probably want to use the on-motherboard Promise RAID chipsets. This server is best relegated to becoming a Windows server if you want RAID with the Promise chipset.
Select your hardware carefully.....
BC
