On 1/14/24 06:59, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
Hi Gene,
Frankly: Dealing with you over a mailing list can be very frustrating for
others trying to help (and especially for people trying to follow the list
who are reading the lists in the background and facing long, long threads).
You're not helping explain yourself well because the mails keep referring
to "other stuff that happened a while ago".
People ask to see mails / messages or whatever exactly because we can't
sit next to you, we can't see what you type, we can't see what you're
meaning.
That's why well-meaning folk keep asking questions to try
and establish what's going on and get a sense of where we can help
(if at all).
There's a whole series of long threads which loop through several
subjects - I can tease out a couple of things.
1.) You have one large deskside machine - large enough that it's tough
to lift or move - which is used for many things.
Correct, a one size fits all machine.
2.) You've added various drive controllers and various drives over a
period.
Correct.
Unclear: At least one of your RAID devices may be mixed between on
motherboard connections and on-card drive controller connections??
No, I boot from /dev/sda, a 1T samsung 870 SSD plugged into the
motherboards sata which has 6 ports
Because I didn't have 4 ports left for the raid, it on its own
controller, one of 2 extra sata controllers currently plugged in. Both
of the extra controlleres are just controllers, no raid in their
pedigree, 1st extra has 6 ports, 2nd extra has 16 ports.
3.) You "lost" a RAID a while ago so you don't trust RAID on some devices
but you're persisting with RAIDs.
No here, it was a pair of quite new 2T seagates that died and started
this whole maryann. Lasted about a month from 1st powerup to going
offline in the night with no warning about 3 weeks after 1st powerup.
Lost everything back to about 2002. The only raid I've ever had is the
current one, which smartctl was sending me emails about but not thru a
normal chaanel, I only found them when I found a strange mbox file in my
home dir. Last mail in the mbox file was dated Jan 7th of this year.
But I've now sussed the smartctl syntax and all 4 drives of the raid say
they are healthy.
4.) You have various add in cards but you don't seem to know which RAID is
which / what's "locking" your filesystem / what's causing your problems.
You now have a slow access to one/more of your RAID devices.
Which from the very limited clues seems to be related to my original of
of plasma for a desktop, with xfce4 on top of that. So I suspecting the
problem might be mixed gui related. This lag or lockup, whatever you
want to call it occurs for any app that opens a file requestor, there at
least 30 seconds of this lag before the gui opens the requestor, at
which point everything returns to normal. Failing ns reslution? I've
NDI. The lags are not logged anyplace I've managed to find a log to read.
5). Unclear: All / ("most"??) of those RAID devices are using Linux mdadm
rather than "RAID" supplied by the individual cards/controllers.
Correct.
Various of us - including myself - have suggested that you simplify things
/ get another machine and divide up functionality. For various reasons
you can't / won't do that.
Mostly lack of space in this tiny childs bedroom to do that, over the
last 35 years its best described as a midden heap. ;o)>
Can you answer the questions I've posted above, please, to try
and clarify what you have. I would have asked you for /etc/fstab and
a couple of other files, but this is good enough to be going on with.
Instant /etc/fstab:
gene@coyote:/etc$ cat fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# systemd generates mount units based on this file, see systemd.mount(5).
# Please run 'systemctl daemon-reload' after making changes here.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=f295334b-fdcb-4428-bed3-cb9e9e129be6 / ext4
errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /tmp was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=518cb65d-21f0-493f-8bb5-a5f435796991 /tmp ext4
defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=422b50db-9913-4ed3-92c3-dc18be72cc61 none swap sw
0 0
/dev/sr0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
UUID=bc6135de-0578-4e3b-b2c0-5c4687abd9bd /home ext4
errors=remount-ro 0 2
UUID=d24c3a99-9f40-4b71-92d4-916804553cb5 none swap sw
0 0
# first put it where it is now & reboot
#LABEL=homesde1 /mnt/homesde1 ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 2
gene@coyote:/etc$
I have not been able to use that last line as a target for rsync, it
make around 13.5 gig of a 360G copy and locks up all i/o. So I've now
refomatted the drive, an am about to powerdown and move that drives data
cable to the 2nd, 16 port controller. When plugged into the 1st 6 port
controller it ran to completion but not to the drive mounted by its
label. So that made me move that data cable off the 1st controller to an
empty plug on the motherboard And that crashes the system i/o. mouse
works, no bash shell or keyboard works, so now I'm going to test by
connecting that drive to the 2nd, 16 port controller and see how far
rsync gets. The current idea is to remove the raid from the environment
by copying it to a single drive, and editing fstab to make that copy my
/home partition. if that does not remove this lag, then the gui mix
theory as the src of this lag is re-enforced. if the lag is gone, then
its in the raid. And we are 1 clue closer to finding the src of this
problem. And ALL of this caused by the installer putting orca and
brltty in without asking just because it found an fdti serial adapter
connected to a cm11a x-10 controller for my Christmas lights. Listening
to orca pronounce each and every keystroke as you type is enough to
drive one to drink and its a very short drive when 20+ installs have
been done because once installed, it cannot be disabled by any means and
still reboot, init locks up waiting for orca, so a reboot was a
reinstall. And I catch hell for squawking about it at the time when
bookworm was only weeks old. I rest my case, I'm powering down to move a
data cable and make the next test.
All the best, as ever,
Likewise Andy, take care, stay warm, dry and well.
Andy Cater
(amaca...@debian.org)
.
Cheers, Gene Heskett.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
