[svlug] Really wierd hd errors (WAS What to include in backups (incremen tal & periodic))

[Jan-Albert Venter]

Talking about backups, I need help :-(

Last night I experienced something that had never happened to me before, my
Linux box siezed to respond to any input at all - dead as windows in the 3
minutes before a blue screen. I managed to swithch terms and saw the
following:
IDE0 HD-Reset Error Device Busy
IDE0 IRQ Timeout 
That repeated about 5 times before I saw 
HDB not ready for command 

Thereafter for the next 9 hours every reboot would do a filesystem check,
fix the same ones and the process would repeat before bootup was completed.
All through this my little windows install (games) on the same drive was
working no worse than ever.

In the end out of desperation I decided to try and backup my data and
recreate the filesystem. I managed to save some but my MP3 colection was
just to big - kept bombing out halfway. It may be important to note that all
this started after I used tar to try and recover a heap of mp3's from a
somewhat damaged CD. One reason being that I used kernel 2.4test1 with a
devfs and devfsd was giving me the error:
Cannot set event mask - Device or Resource Busy 
So I figure maybe it was a devfsd bug.

Next I found myself lacking a redhat cd so I grabbed a suse 6.3 cd I had
lying around figuring I should try it out anyway.

My custom partition set is of course nothing like the one used by suze so
everything was made and formatted from scratch, package 14 was gnu
shellutils. It froze at 9% I switched terminals and guess which errors I
saw.

I am completely stumped, it sounds like hardware errors but it only seems to
affect Linux, the drive is a 20GB Western Digitall thats less than 6 months
old.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jasmine Sante [mailto:jasmine at entercomm.com]
Sent: 02 August 2000 08:20
To: svlug at lists.svlug.org
Subject: [svlug] What to include in backups (incremental & periodic)


Hi all,

We are setting up a tape backup system, to be run as a cron job for weekly
"full" backups and 2 or 3 incremental backups during the week.  I'm not
certain which files to include in the full backup...do I just dump
everything?  Or are there specific directories that I can leave out?  Some
that I *must* include?

Also, I'd only planned on including user files and database dumps in the
incremental backups.  Are there other things I should include?

I am running red hat linux 6.0, Apache w/ fairly standard file structures.

Thanks!
J

Jasmine Sante
Entercomm Inc.
jasmine at entercomm.com
415.440.8100 x 107

-----Original Message-----
From: svlug-admin at lists.svlug.org [mailto:svlug-admin at lists.svlug.org]On
Behalf Of Ray Olszewski
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 2:40 PM
To: svlug at lists.svlug.org
Subject: Re: [svlug] Apache comes to a crawl...at increasing intervals
<help!>

At 12:52 PM 7/17/00 -0700, Jasmine Sante wrote:
>I'm a newbie to Linux (tho w/ hpux exp) suddenly responsible for a server
>that has recently started bombing...at increasing intervals.  When I
restart
>the server & the web server, everything comes up  - but just restarting the
>web server doesn't do it - so I'm assuming that the system is creating some
>ever-growing file/memory-leak that clears on restart.  If someone could
just
>point me in the direction of some good trouble shooting resources in this
>area, I'd be *most* grateful.
>
>I'm running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix)  (Red Hat/Linux) mod_perl/1.21

Your problem description is sufficiently vague that I don't really know what
area "this" area is. Linux? Apache? mod_perl? Memory leaks? Or just beginner
resources in general?

There is actually a Troubleshooting HowTo, which you can find listed at

        http://www.linuxdoc.org

under the HowTos. That might lead you to something helpful.

There are a lot of specialized linux lists run at vger.rutgers.edu, through
majordomo; deal with it in the usual majordomo way. I expect Red Hat's site
has some majordomo-style mailing lists too.

SVLUG's own Web site, http://www.svlug.org, lists a lot of online Linux
resources, some of which may help you.

Your best bet, though, might be to post a follow-up here with a more
carefully detailed trouble report, at the level of detail you'd describe to
a Tech Support person if you were paying for the call. Start by telling us
what "bombing" means ... if you can try "just restarting the web server"
(even without success), clearly the host itself isn't completely failing.
Include the output of "free" and "df", so we know something about system
resources. See if tail'ing apache's log file tells you anything. But most
important: be complete and careful in your descriptions, avoiding imprecise
terms like "bomb".


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA                                    ray at comarre.com
----------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
svlug mailing list
svlug at lists.svlug.org
http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug


_______________________________________________
svlug mailing list
svlug at lists.svlug.org
http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug