Yesterday we had the experience of a panic of our Alphaserver 1000A
running DU4.0d with jumbo patch 3 (the latest Advfs patch installed seems
to be Patch 0392.01 - AdvFS Consolidated Patch).
/var/adm/messages says
Mar 19 15:08:53 abel vmunix: ADVFS EXCEPTION
Mar 19 15:08:54 abel vmunix: Module = ms_logger.c, Line = 2005
Mar 19 15:08:54 abel vmunix: release_dirty_pg: log half full
Mar 19 15:08:54 abel vmunix: panic (cpu 0): release_dirty_pg: log half
full
dia also simply reports the "release_dirty_pg: log half full".
According to /var/adm/crash/crash-data.0 defragment was running at the
time of the crash (started at 4:00). There is a core file in / from kdbx,
which seems to have had a segmentation fault while running at boot after
the crash.
At least some of the advfs filesystems on the box were created January
1996, probably under du 3.2c. Most filesystems have little free space. The
volumes are on a SWX RAID controller (230).
I would like your advice on the following:
Due to the tight disk space we are going to install a RA3000 instead
of the swxcr230 within a few weeks. In the course of this all the advfs
domains will, of course, be recreated.
1) Should I panic now myself, stop the server, recreate the filesystems
on the existing volumes and restore from tape. Or should I just stop
running defragment for the next few weeks and hope nothing else triggers
the "log half full" panic before the new disksystems are installed?
2) Any newer patches I should install ASAP?
3) Should it be possible from the crash data to find out which file
domain was the reason for the crash?
4) (This has not much todo with the crash) On the RA3000 I plan to use a
2x4Gb disks in a RAID 1 set for system disk and 5x18Gb in a RAID 5 set for
user files to be exported via NFS and Samba. At the outset the RAID 5
set would be one big advfs domain split into a couple of filesets.
Would it be beneficial for (write) performance on the user files to use
some of the space on the RAID 1 set for the Advfs log file?
Yours
Niels Joergen Kokholm | email: kokholm_at_math.ku.dk
Institut for Matematiske Fag | phone: +45 3532 0759/+45 2128 6932
Universitetsparken 5 | fax: +45 3532 0704
DK-2100 Kobenhavn OE, Denmark | www:
http://www.math.ku.dk/~kokholm
Received on Tue Mar 21 2000 - 08:01:47 NZST