Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 14:56:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Sonja Jo Krenz-Bush <begonia@itchy.serv.net> To: David Greenman <dg@root.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: help! system crashing 2-4 times a day with vinvalbuf - flush failed Message-ID: <Pine.BSD.3.91.960927145204.551B-100000@itchy.serv.net> In-Reply-To: <199609251930.MAA06910@root.com>
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Are there parameters that we can change (either on the crashing server) or the server that the filesystem is being NFS mounted from, that might alleviate this problem? I find it peculiar that this never happened until we replaced the drive on the one server (our mail server) where it is performing fine but seems to be related to a problem on another server. I'm really at a loss of what to do about this one, any suggestions would be helpful. On Wed, 25 Sep 1996, David Greenman wrote: > >Our server, which had been running fine for the last 7 months started > >crashing 2-4 times a day this week. Today, I finally managed to see the > >error message echoed to the console (or part of it). > > > >It said: > > > >vinvalbuf - flush failed > > > >We're running FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE. This system serves as web server and > >shell access server. Usually around 6-10 people logged on, most of them > >reading mail and/or news. > > > >Things I have noticed - we've had some unkillable processes that were > >mail related - ie, /usr/bin/mail, pine, RMAIL, etc... Crashes seem to > >happen when something like this is going on. In the past, this had > >happened occascionally but never crashed the system. > > > >Things that have changed: our /usr/spool/mail is NFS mounted from the mail > >server. Earlier this week, the drive on the mail server started giving us > >problems so we replaced it. The mail server itself isn't having any > >problems since we replaced the disk and is running FreeBSD 2.1.0-RELEASE. > > It's almost a sure bet that NFS is the cause, although I don't know > precisely what would trigger something like this. NFS doesn't do any vnode > locking, so it's easy to imagine how new buffers could get attached during > a flush (causing the panic). > > >Is this something that is fixed in 2.1.5R? Let me know if I need to give > >additional information - I'm not the person who primarily does this but > >wanted to get started on figuring this out right away. > > If the cause is what I think it is, not likely. > > -DG > > David Greenman > Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project > Sonja Jo Krenz-Bush ServNet/Abstract Software sjkb@abstractsoft.com http://www.serv.net/~begonia ``Just another one of the flock following the herd.''
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