One thing on that server that I find kinda hard to understand is that at a
different time of the day, every day, the whole server is dumped to a second
hard drive with the same vendor dump program. I took out the -u option so it
did not use /etc/dumpdates. I am more apt to believe that it is a driver
problem with the ethernet card because I am having a problem on two other
machines with that same nic. They are all 3c509 nics but the weird thing is
that on the other ones when a backup is run, they just stop responding on
that nic. If I try to ping out that nic it gives an error of ping: sendto:
No buffer space available
I have been searching places like google and it seems like this may be
linked to a bad drive because I found people that had the same driver and
the same error. I dont know why that one would be freezing instead of just
breaking that nic card though.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John R. Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ryan Williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2001 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: server crashes
> >... Each time amdump runs on the server, one of the clients (a
> >freebsd 4.0 box) completely hangs without an error in the
/var/log/messages.
> >I have not found any logs to tell me what broke when I ran a backup.
Does
> >anyone have an idea about what is wrong or what I should check?
>
> This is all guesswork because I don't run FreeBSD, but that's never
> stopped me from shooting off my E-mouth before :-):
>
> * It could be any number of hardware problems, including the disk
> being backed up, the cable, the controller, seating of any of the
> things that move, bad termination, bad option switch settings,
> speed mismatches (SCSI-2 on a SCSI-1 bus), bad firmware, bad DMA
> control to/from memory, bad memory, etc. It could also be any of
> the above with the network interface rather than the disk.
>
> * It could be a kernel problem dealing with a hardware problem, or a
> just plain kernel/driver bug.
>
> * It is unlikely to be a problem with the dump program or any portion
> of Amanda. Those all run in normal user space and usually with
> minimal special privileges.
>
> Probably the first few things I'd try are reseating everything that moves
> and checking all the DIP switches and jumpers. Twice. Then once more.
>
> Then I'd try a few dummy dumps (are you using dump or GNU tar?) along
> these lines (adjust as needed for your OS):
>
> dump 0f - /some/file/system > /dev/null
> dump 9f - /some/file/system > /dev/null
>
> If you have maxdumps set greater than one, you might try two (or more)
> of these at the same time to add even more contention.
>
> You might also try some large (dump image sized) ftp transfers from the
> client to /dev/null on the server.
>
> Unless you happen to find a FreeBSD expert here (which is certainly
> likely), my guess is you'll need to go those mailing lists to get much
> more help with this. They might be able to tell you, for instance,
> how to get into the machine when it is hung and find out exactly what
> processes are running, what the kernel is doing, etc.
>
> >Ryan Williams
>
> John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
