gmirror+gjournal: spontaneous reboots on "excessive" disk access

[Ivan Voras]

Michael Grimm wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> I'm running a gmirror raid1 plus gjournal for a year now. This is a
> 7.2-RELEASE-p6 right now. Both disks are regular ATA and healthy
> according smartctl.
> 
> Sometimes, not always though, I do experience spontaneous reboots
> without leaving any hints in logfiles whenver I "beat" my disks
> "excessively". This might be something like:
> 
>         dd if=/dev/null of=/some/file bs=1M count=4k
> plus
>         parallel disk accesses by mail and news server.
> 
> If I omit all parallel disk access those dd's will run to completion
> without reboots, always.

What you have is a common symptom of hardware problems - either a weak 
power supply or a broken disk controller. In the first case because two 
drives try to suck power where only one was doing it before and in the 
second reason because the disk controller is too broken to correctly 
handle simultaneous access to two drives. Unfortunately, if you don't 
get any console error messages it is hard to tell which. The power 
supply is usually easier to replace.