Timothy A. Holmes wrote:
> I was attempting to make an update to our webserver this morning, and
> got an error telling me that I did not have write permissions to a
> directory that I should have, I sshed in and tried to check the
> permission, and change them, and received notification that my
> filesystem was read only. This is an FC3 box running an ext3 file
> system. I thought this to be extremely suspicious, so I went to the
> console to investigate. When I got there, the screen was full of
> scrolling notices that there had been a journal exception.
>
> I rebooted the system, and when it came back telling me that the file
> system had been uncleanly unmounted, I forced the file system integrity
> check. It promptly kicked me out to a shell, and told me to run the
> fsck command, which I did, Its now running the command.
>
> My question has four parts:
>
> 1. What happened?
Probably a hardware problem. Could be power, could be cooling, could be
memory, could be the CPU, could be the motherboard, could be a hard
drive.
> 2. What can I do to prevent it from happening again (this is the
> second time in 6 months that this has happened on this box)?
> 3. what else do I need to do to remedy it
> 4. is there any way that I could have known about this earlier, I
> interacted with the box last on Saturday afternoon, and it appeared
> happy then.
Is this local to you, or is it in a remote datacentre?
Power and cooling should be fairly obvious. Do you have a UPS? Is it
working properly?
Are all the fans working? Is there much dust in the case?
For the hard disks, you should try
smartctl -l error /dev/hda
(from smartmontools: it's part of Fedora Core).
You can test a lot of the system (including memory) with memtest.
Slightly dodgy CPUs are difficult to test, because you don't know what's
dodgy. The standard recommendation always used to be a kernel compile,
which still sounds worthwhile.
And get good backups!
Hope this helps,
James.
--
E-mail address: james | "The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the
@westexe.demon.co.uk | language is that of Microsoft, which I will not utter
| here. But this in the Common Tongue is what is said:
| By this or any other name, You are well and truly..."
