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Date:      Wed, 05 Jan 2005 09:14:56 -0600
From:      "Joseph Koenig (jWeb)" <joe@jwebmedia.com>
To:        <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Hardware or OS problem?
Message-ID:  <BE016090.154E4%joe@jwebmedia.com>

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Hi,

We have a system that is currently giving us some trouble. The system is
FreeBSD 4.9. It's a 2 GHz system with 1MB RAM and (here's the kicker) 73GB
RAID 1 ATA drives. The system serves as a web/database server dedicated to 1
site. Daily the system goes out and downloads real estate listings (via
shell scripts and cURL) and processes them (via PHP into MySQL). Also,
nightly the system downloads a zipped set of images (probably around
400-500) and processes them into thumbnails (PHP scripts calling
ImageMagick). Over the last week or two, the system is crashing and
rebooting into single user mode. It's not consistently during updates, or
resizing of images, or anything like that. Yesterday, it crashed with 99%
processor idle and load averages of 0.00 0.00 0.00 -- I was watching a 'top'
when the machine died. When it boots into single user mode, an fsck must be
run, which identified a few corrupt JPEG files -- however, the sysadmin who
reboots it never tells me which files they are. The sysadmin is convinced it
is a FreeBSD problem and says that Linux will not crash because of a corrupt
file and if it does, will not boot into single user mode and he will be able
to access it remotely to do the fsck. About 3-4 weeks ago, one of the drives
in the mirror set crashed and had to be replaced. I'm not convinced that
drives are not to blame for these issues. Is there any way to verify that?
Is it possible a corrupt JPEG on the drive could cause the system to crash
randomly? What can I do to correctly identify the problem so that we can fix
it and not change the OS? Thanks,

Joe Koenig
Production Manager
jWeb New Media Design
joe@jWebmedia.com
http://www.jwebmedia.com/
636.928.3162



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