Strange server lockups on freebsd 4.9/10

Hi all,

May be someone has seen this before and can help me out.

High disc activity on my servers causes my freebsd boxes to crash. The problem most of the time occurs while coping files from 1 physical to the other. And nothing to be found in the logfiles.

* All servers have dual Xeon 3 ghz procs and 4 gig of Ram.
* Adaptec AIC7902 Ultra320 SCSI adapter and 2 physical discs.



Thanks in advance,

Patrick

anyone ?

the only reason i imagine is HW
defective RAM, reading from or writing to bad HD blocks.

a suggestion, mount a sure working external device (tape, cd, hd ...)
then copy src to it:
- crash, i check MEM(*) and src-disk(**)
- no crash, i check the target disk(**)

(*) should write logs i suppose in /var
(**) fsck, newfs, at least format

btw: how do you perform the copy? tar, cpio, {ufs}dump, dd, cp ...

last one: check your disks for OVERLAPPING partitions

1. define "crash"
2. tell us what you have tried already

Describe anything special about your setup please, esp: How are you using FreeBSD 4 on a dual cpu machine? One cpu will never be used. Did you install the SMP kernel? Did you check if it is compatible with your mainboard at all?
Did you check all of your hardware for compatibility with FreeBSD?
Does it still crash if you disable ACPI?
BIOS update for your Mainboard?
Your topic title is about FreeBSD "4.9 / 10" - what's this?
You said "boxes". Same problem on more than one? Identical hardware? 4.9 on one, 4.10 on the other?
Did you try upgrading to 4-STABLE?

Since the problem seems to be reproducable, you can enable the kernel debugger and see where it hangs - if it does hang (see #1).

OTOH - This question would be better directed to one of the FreeBSD mailinglists.
A quick check on google reveals a lot of similar questions there. Did you read them yet?

M.