Re: fsck and dump freeze freebsd. any ideas?
On 29 Jul 2009 , freebsd-questions-requ...@freebsd.org entreated about freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 269, Issue 6: After one of the last crashes, the system would lock up a short time after rebooting. I found the problem caused by background fsck locking up the system. I took the partition out of the startup check for now. I 'think' I was installing a port during the last crash, but it has been a while. I performed a fsck and a dump (to /dev/null) confirming that both do crash the freebsd 7.2 and 6.2 (which I booted off of a separate drive). A tar to /dev/null did run successfully, but I recall reading that that is not a recommended way to backup/move a filesystem. The /usr partition where it causes trouble is in a raid5 geom_vinum three drive array. I did not yet have the array rebuild the My experience has been that dump *with snapshot* of a live filesystem will crash if the filesystem is 'large'. MY solution is to umount the partition. This happens with my 800GB /home which is part of a 4 drive raid5 array (ar driver with hardware setup). It used to happen with the previous 320GB mirror array too, just with /home which is the biggest partition. This is one reason I moved away from tape backup to a secondary server full of harddrives as backup target, the tape took far too long with /home unmounted and users were affected. As for the fsck crashing, I'm lost. Maybe a faulty drive? -- DA Fo rsythNetwork Supervisor Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
fsck and dump freeze freebsd. any ideas?
The smartctl tests on the three drives came back saying they were checked 100% without error; bad sectors have always caused an error and an aborted scan at the point of trouble for me in the past. I 'thought' I recalled seeing a panic along the lines of ffs_free or something related to free blocks or something at one point; maybe that was an error with fsck on the live system when manually ran. I will try to reproduce. Otherwise I do not know that fsck crashes; the entire system locks. I will see if I can reproduce the problem as a panic. There were some errors fsck seems to think it cleaned. A couple still exist indicating wrong counts about '12 should be 4' or '4 should be 0' type stuff. One error had a ridiculously large seven digit or so number that fsck said should be reduced. I had made a many terabyte file with a dd write to the end of a file of the largest size it would let me create and have since deleted the file; maybe that was what the reference was to. After fixing some errors, the fsck still causes a freeze and at what seems to be about the same point. The filesystem was unmounted for the dump and fsck has been attempted both mounted and unmounted. The filesystem has (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates) reported for features by mount under normal operation. The freeze with dump did occur during a snapshot creation, which I found I cannot kill with a -9 (kill attempted minutes before the crash which still would not stop the creation). The powerdown question is more for how to handle an unsafe powerdown/crash on an active system. If I need to read from a partition, would read only leave it completely clean? Is there a way to operate on a file system which is treated as more of a ramdisk of changes and keeps the real partition unmodified (giving results like Faronics deepfreeze software or qemu disks in snapshot mode)? Would a zfs mirror configuration handle the unexpected crash/powerdown? Would it just report and fix the corruption, mention what files/structures weror impacted, offer restore of that data from a recent snapshot, or just say it is time to restore from a backup? Thanks again for the feedback, Ed Sutton ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
fsck and dump freeze freebsd. any ideas?
After one of the last crashes, the system would lock up a short time after rebooting. I found the problem caused by background fsck locking up the system. I took the partition out of the startup check for now. I 'think' I was installing a port during the last crash, but it has been a while. I performed a fsck and a dump (to /dev/null) confirming that both do crash the freebsd 7.2 and 6.2 (which I booted off of a separate drive). A tar to /dev/null did run successfully, but I recall reading that that is not a recommended way to backup/move a filesystem. The /usr partition where it causes trouble is in a raid5 geom_vinum three drive array. I did not yet have the array rebuild the parity nor do I know if there is any advantage/disadvantage in doing so (for this problem). I ran a long test on the drives using smartctl (which is a safer surface check than dd because 1 bad sector on my promise controller will cause a panic; I have an unrelated drive with a corrupted sector if the promise controller dirver has an interested maintainer.) When running fsck, it is somewhere within phase 1 when it crashes. I ran a truss run of fsck with -aedD and snapped a photo of my screen when it crashed which I can type up if it is of any use. At the time of freebsd freezing, the hard drive activity light goes from a faint flicker to on solid for about a second and then goes out. The system is completely unresponsive where it locks showing no sign of activity that I have been able to notice. I imagine the recommendation is start over, but before I do (and likely just try a tar backup/restore), are there any other suggestions and questions before I blow away the problem? It would be nice for freebsd users to not be able to run into such a problem. As a final question, is there any safe way to crash freebsd (or pull system power) without a risk of filesystem corruption? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: fsck and dump freeze freebsd. any ideas?
On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:07:13 -0700, Edward Sanford Sutton, III mirror...@cox.net wrote: As a final question, is there any safe way to crash freebsd (or pull system power) without a risk of filesystem corruption? An easy way is to go into single user mode and umount all the partitions, then press Reset or Power off. Most cases of file system corruption on hard reset or power loss are often repaired well by the fsck program. (I had system crashes due to defective USB sticks and never had file system corruption after a successful fsck run. Note that I did fsck in the foreground.) If you cannot umount disks, run sync three or four times and wait a little while. This is not as good as umounting disks, and quite useless if the system is active (in terms of file I/O). -- Polytropon From Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: fsck and dump freeze freebsd. any ideas?
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote: On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:07:13 -0700, Edward Sanford Sutton, III mirror...@cox.net wrote: As a final question, is there any safe way to crash freebsd (or pull system power) without a risk of filesystem corruption? An easy way is to go into single user mode and umount all the partitions, then press Reset or Power off. Most cases of file system corruption on hard reset or power loss are often repaired well by the fsck program. (I had system crashes due to defective USB sticks and never had file system corruption after a successful fsck run. Note that I did fsck in the foreground.) If you cannot umount disks, run sync three or four times and wait a little while. This is not as good as umounting disks, and quite useless if the system is active (in terms of file I/O). -- Polytropon From Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... I've had fs corruption after a successful fsck runs, sometimes multiples are needed. I think after 2 consecutive runs it's as good as it's going to get, but I could be wrong more may be helpful. This is a rare occurrence in my experience. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
