FreeBSD 6.1, crashes and a lack of vmcores

[Matt Ruzicka]

On Fri, 26 May 2006, soralx at cydem.org wrote:
> 0. how many hours did you run memtest86 for?

One of my co-workers ran the test so I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty 
certain it was at least over night (so probably 15-16 hours).  We also 
ended up swapping that RAM out with another box and the problem did not 
move to the new box.

> 1. did you try to swap the mainboard?

Yeah we actually ended up buying an entirely new chassis (MB, power 
supplies, case).

> 2. do you suspect any corelation between net traffic intensity,type,etc,
>   and crashes?

It is possible because we do a TON of traffic through these boxes, but 
things like mbufs and other limited resources seem to be ok.  It is 
definitely possible I'm not looking in the right place for something else 
that would be causing this.  However, as I mentioned earlier, this is one 
box out of a farm that is acting particularly less stable and all the 
boxes should ideally be receiving similar traffic loads.

> 3. disabling ACPI made no change?

Disabling ACPI resolved a number of noisy boot time messages, but didn't 
give us any noticeable edge in stability.

Now that the long weekend is over I'll likely have some time to try a few 
more things related to the drive.  I suspect I might have inadvertently 
introduced a negative variable in the drive swapping I did.  I'd like to 
make this last change before digging too much deeper unless the trace data 
gives anyone else any clues.

Thanks everyone for you input.

Matt Ruzicka - Senior Systems Administrator
Front Range Internet, Inc.
matt at frii.net - (970) 212-0728