*BSD News Article 63360


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1.0 System Crashes often, please help.
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 17:14:25 -0800
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <3140DB71.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org>
References: <4hbai5$3gd@dot.cstone.net> <4hg6u6$hd9@crocus.gamma.ru>
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To: Igor Timkin <ivt@gamma.ru>
CC: pauln@cstone.net

Igor Timkin wrote:
> Paul Nguyen (pauln@cstone.net) wrote:
> : Hello,
> 
> : We are having this problem with one of our webservers.  The machine does fine
> : for 3-5 days after being installed and then it crashes.  When it comes back up
> : it stops at the boot: prompt and then keeps on cycling through reboots.  We
> I have the same problem on news server.
> 
> Configuration:
> FreeBSD-2.1.0R

Hmmm.  Needless to say, this is rather disturbing and not generally
indicative of FreeBSD's stabiltity as a web server.  Most people report
uptimes of weeks or even months, usually interrupted only for routine
maintainance and backups.

Nonetheless, I'd certainly like to help you guys solve these problems.
Can both of you try the simple experiment of turning the internal and
external caches off and running that way for awhile?  It certainly won't
make your systems into speed-demons, but it will at least rule out
memory corruption as the first possibility.

The more obvious possibility is the Adaptec UltraWide support, since
it's one factor you guys have in common, and if you don't have any luck
with the cache test I would suggest that you talk to Justin Gibbs
<gibbs@freebsd.org>, the author of the code in question.  In fact, you
may wish to talk to him first since he may have some patches for you to
try and, if they fix the problem, will save you having to play with the
caches at all.  To be honest, I *don't* suspect the cache but it's such
a common failure mode that I like to check for it anyway.  The range of
pathologies a system with bad cache (or memory) can exhibit is truly
amazing.  Above all, please don't suffer in silence.  If you continue to
have problems, send us mail at questions@freebsd.org - far more of the
developers read that mailing list than read USENET news.
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project