*BSD News Article 96306


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From: Juan Lorenzana <juan@maindrag.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Corrupt /usr partition with signal 11 error
Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 13:19:27 -0600
Organization: Brigham Young University
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Hello,
  I need some help in determining the cause of a problem.  We have a
fairly new system with FreeBSD 2.1.5.  Every week, we our machine
basically dies.  /usr get's unmounted and the whole partition becomes
corrupt.  We loose everything in /usr.  The machine is used as a web
server and only has one account.  This client uses a lot of perl scripts
and from our error logs, we can determine the time of failure due to
kernel errors of: 

May 24 05:46:17 global /kernel: pid 14257 (perl), uid 1004: exited on
signal 11
May 24 05:46:17 global /kernel: pid 14134 (perl), uid 1004: exited on
signal 10

  We know that somehow, /usr gets unmounted and that it also gets
corrupted to the point where everything is unusable. Has anyone seen
this before? Does anyone know what could cause this?
  We have hid some files in /usr so that if /usr unmounts, then the
remaining files allow us to telnet to the machine so that we can at
least reboot and rebuild the system from a backup drive. We were able to
grab the error messages from /var/log/messages by doing a tail -f of
messages and having it put it in /etc where we could then look at it to
analyze.  Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
  We believe that an signal 11 is a memory or mother board problem.  We
swapped the 2 front simms to the back hoping that if it is memory, the
(supposeably bad) simm is farther back so that it might never be used. 
The machine has 64 megs and usually runs at a load of .02 to .84.  The
interesting thing is that the web server keeps going, we believe it
keeps going due to it might have cached the pages before all the
/usr/home stuff disappears.  Thanks :)

Regards,

Juan Lorenzana
juan@maindrag.com