Catestrophic failure

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, May 17, 2005, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
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>Box Details:
>Dell Latitude C640, 2.3GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and 80GB drive.
>SuSE 9.2 Professional with many bells and whistles as supplied by SuSE.
>
>This morning I can into work where I leave this guy running, and the
>machine is nonresponsive and the hard drive light is on solid.
>I can ping it, but SSH to it hangs for as long as I leave it.
>
>Hard power down.  Booting up causes kernel panic, cannot mount root
>partition.
>I boot to a SuSE 9.1 install still hanging around on the box and fdisk
>the 9.2 root partition.  After having immense number of repairs (as in
>"fdisk -y") I find roughly 100MB in /lost+found, some looking like
>Python, some like fonts, and a whole bunch of others.  The journal is
>toasted, and I have to treat the partition like it's ext2.  I've thus
>far had to reinstall several font-related packages, xorg-packages, and
>OpenOffice (just haven't found the others).  I'm back up and running,
>but wondering what happened.
>
>Unfortunately, this is the second time this has happened, last time it
>was worse, it was /home.  Luckily I keep important stuff synched
>between 3 boxes using Unison, so the /home failure wasn't as bad as it
>could have been.

This sounds like hardware, or possibly a cancerous reiser file system.  I
would be reluctant to use that hardware for production until it had been
running clean in a non-critical system.

We've been using ext3 for the ``/'' file system, and xfs for ``/home'' on
the recommendation of a very knowledgeable hard and Linux tech who work at
pogo Linux.  The ext3 system doesn't require fsck frequently, supports the
``immutable'' attributes which can be used to make it more difficult to
change critical files accidentally, and I've never had a catastrophic
failure with ext3 or ext2 file systems (I can't say the same for reiserfs).

We've been using SuSE since 8.1 or so.

Bill
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