Category: Rant

After last night’s hang, I resolved to do some testing to see if I need a new motherboard or something.

I booted my computer with a non-smp kernel into single user mode. This would eliminate most “distractions” or other causes for the error. Mounted /dev/hdc1, which is an ext3 file system. I did a simple tar of some of the files on /dev/hdc1, and after about 30 seconds it froze up.

So then I booted with a Mandrake Move CD, which has a 2.4 kernel. I mounted /dev/hdc1 again, and did the tar and it worked. Then I mounted /dev/hdc4, my mp3 collection, and did something that’s frozen up my computer every time since I upgraded:


find . -type f -print | sort > /tmp/mp3.files


It didn’t freeze. Not only that, but my mp3s appear to still be there (although the presence of large numbers of files in /mp3s/lost+found makes me think that some of them will be pooched.)

So now my question becomes – how do I get back to a 2.4 (or maybe a 2.6 non-Fedora) system without incurring another 2 days of downtime and headaches? I won’t be around this weekend, and I don’t particularly want to risk this happening every night for two weeks.

I woke up this morning to find every screen logged into the server was showing “unable to contact the UPS” errors. One window was still responding a bit, and an “uptime” command showed the load average just a hair over 230, and rising.

After power cycling, I find the log shows that sometime around 2am, when the nightly cron jobs kick off, the second IDE controller started throwing errors again.

I’ve got to consider the following possibilities:

• The hardware just miraculously decided to fail when I upgraded.
• The hardware was always a little bit bad, but the 2.6 kernel notices the problem and the 2.4 kernel didn’t. OR
• There is nothing wrong with the hardware and it’s a fault in the kernel

Tonight I’m going to have to go offline again, while I try booting with a Knoppix CD with a 2.4 kernel to test the hardware again. If that works, then I’m going to try 2.6 with no smp, and with the infamous “noapic” flag (whatever the hell that means).

There is apparently no such thing as an easy upgrade. This weekend’s project was to upgrade my server from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 3. That’s not supposed to be difficult. But of course with my luck with computers, it was more than just difficult, it’s been a long and frustrating experience, and it’s nowhere near over.
Continue reading “Getting there…”

My ip changed again. This is happening more and more often, and it’s starting to piss me off. The only way to get a static IP from my ISP (RoadRunner) is to sign up as a business customer, which costs about 3 times as much with no other change in service level.