Odd problems with 5.1 RELEASE

[Hidetoshi Shimokawa]

At Wed, 4 Feb 2004 15:30:19 +0100,
Oliver Hoffmann wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> I do backups to external firewire-hds. The fw-controler-card is the Texas 
> Instruments TSB12LV26. I connected an external 5.25" case (oxford 911) with a 
> mobilerack inside. In this rack is a160 GB (Maxtor 6Y160PO) harddisk. 
> It runs FreeBSD 5.1 RELEASE on an Athlon 1500+ with an Abit 
> motherboard. It has one ICP-Vortex with a raid-system (ca. 200 GB, level 5). 
> I had a lot of trouble with 4.7 and 4.8 and I couldn't use 5.0 because of the 
> raid-controler. Thus the time I installed the system 5.1 REL. was probably 
> the best for my situation. 
> But this server is not stable (not as stable as I expect from FreeBSD). I'm 
> not sure whether this has something to do with firewire or not: 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=i386/60919. Does somebody had such 
> problems in combination with fw?
> Another issue are strange sporadic crashes particular at night after or during 
> the backups. There is nothing to see in the logs or at  ttyv0. It just hangs 
> completely. These crashes occured more often after I connected a second HD 
> for a monthly backup.
> I have a second fileserver (5.1 REL.) with IDE-raid, but the same firewire 
> hardware (only one fw-HD). It works flawless.

Did you test your system's memory?

> When I switch off the second fw-disk (/dev/da0) and then try too mount the 
> first one or start sysinstall those processes will be in the process list for 
> ever (without doing what I want of course). It is not possible to kill them 
> until I switch this device on again. I want to remove da0 again, because I 
> want to check whether this second disk has an influence concerning stability. 
> But how can I do that?

See manpage of sbp(4) and run 'fwcontron -r' several times.

> I wonder why the second fw-disk gets the name da0 and the first one da2. I 
> also wonder why I have to switch of da2 in order to get the system booting.

I cannot get your situation.., how do you distinguish the firest and
the second?

/\ Hidetoshi Shimokawa
\/  simokawa at sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp
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