On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 04:39:51PM +0000, Gavin Atkinson wrote: > On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 07:36 -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > > # vmstat -i > > ata0 irq14 6 0 > > fxp0 irq10 14874 28 > > mux irq11 65028 125 > > fdc0 irq6 1 0 > > sio0 irq4 948 1 > > clk irq0 516187 998 > > rtc irq8 66071 127 > > Total 663115 1282 > > Do any of these numbers continue to increase after the hang? You may > find that if you are already logged in over the serial port before the > hang and have run vmstat recently, it'll still be runnable due to it > being cached.
When this problem is happening, at the login: prompt (via serial console) once one types "root" and hits enter, one never gets a Password: prompt. This is likely because getpwent(3) and friends attempt to read passwd/master.passwd from the disk, which obviously hung due to the SCSI controller. Therefore, one cannot log in and run any commands. > If the serial port is dead, you will probably still find you can get > output from the serial port, so start "date; vmstat -i" in a loop over > the serial port before it hangs, and watch the output once it wedges. Once the machine is hung like described, since running shell commands (date/vmstat/even spawning sh itself) involves disk I/O, this won't work. If date and vmstat could be cached in memory somewhere, this might work, but I don't know how one would do that. (A memory filesystem could work, but pretty much all of / would have to be there for this to work...) The best I could do would be to have a cronjob or a process running in a screen session which does date && vmstat -i over and over to a log file, and examine that log once the machine hung like described. This wouldn't tell us if the numbers were increasing/fluxuating *after* the hang, though. :-( -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
