jeffy124's Journal: on an unscheduled break....

the Linux box I log into to do all my work appears to have crashed, leaving me with nothing to do for a few minutes while it gets rebooted. The error message (that showed up on every window I had open) from the kernel said assertion failure at some line in the kernel while I attempted to do the simplest of things - an ls.

This is only the second time I've seen a linux box crash, but the first that was the actual kernel. The other was a few months ago courtesy a file descriptor leak led to a lack of available descriptors. Someone had forgotten to close() a file before opening a new one using the same file pointer in his code, progressively leading to everyone being unable to do anything that involved file access, which included running executable files.

Which kernel?

[leviramsey]

(en tea)

Re:Which kernel?

[jeffy124]

i'm not sure. I think it's 2.4.18. But I'm not 100% certain it was the actual kernel, as the message gave a filename and line number, and channels.c doesnt exist in the kernel. I dont have the error message I got handy, as the box is now up again.

Re:Which kernel?

[jeffy124]

it was the kernel. The SA just got back from the meeting I had disturbed him at. The box is over near where the meeting was, so at he least he didnt have to walk across campus to get to the console.

commit.c line 535. Basically, the journaling fs tried to commit changes to the disk, and hiccupped just as I attempted my ls.

Re:Which kernel?

[gmhowell]

Kooky. Which jfs are you using?

Re:Which kernel?

[jeffy124]

ext3

for some reason, it wasnt possible to use reiserfs at install time, so we defaulted to ext3. (iirc, this was redhat 7.1) our other machine uses reiser, but we converted it from ext3 after install (a real bitch of a procedure). If we continue to have problems with ext3, we're gonna make the effort to convert to reiserfs.

Re:Which kernel?

[gmhowell]

How do you convert, short of copying to backup drive, reformatting, copy back?

Funny. I started with Reiser, and have moved to ext3. Mostly, I wanted the ability to mount as an ext2 partition (the last time I had to make the decision, ext2 was the only thing supported on lots of recovery discs. Have stuck due to inertia.)

Re:Which kernel?

[jeffy124]

in short, yes.

the big issue for us is /home. There are only about 5-6 users on this machine, myself and another guy take up several gigs of stuff, which is then duplicated in the cvs repository. The others just use a measly 10k or so. There's also not much in terms of extra disk space to hold data during conversion.

For our other machine, we converted it before anyone had accounts or anything whatsoever. Hence, it was much easier to do, plus with half a TB of disk available, conversion went quite well.