On Jul 27, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Ranga Nathan wrote:
We are running SuSE 9 on a guest under z/VM 5.1. I have been getting a
message from the cron daemon about a problem with the "updatedb"
script.
On investigation I found that this script file was corrupted at the
end.
My attempts to rsync and edit caused this guest to hang. I had to
re-IPL
it many times. When I deleted this file and tried to rsync it from
another, it hung as I was typing.
I found some file corruptions on the root file system (reiserfs). I
can
not believe that a file corruption could hang Linux. I have never seen
this happen.
Anyone had a situation like this?
Yes, although it is usually in my experience associated with failing
hardware. That is, what's causing the hang is that the system is
spinning trying to read a disk block that it's never going to get,
but for whatever reason, it doesn't give up and report a failure.
I would recommend trying to DDR that disk to another to see whether
VM thinks the hardware is OK, or whether you encounter a problem just
reading the data off it.
If the disk itself is fine, it might be reiserfs that's causing the
problem--I know that I've had issues with data corruption (and indeed
kernel panics) under extremely heavy load. And since reiserfs does
run within kernel space, a bug in it could quite plausibly hang the
system. I assume you see no panic messages from the kernel? Make
sure you spool the console so you have whatever messages do get emitted.
Adam
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