[ILUG] Systems crashing on disk activity

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Niall O Broin wrote:

> We migrated one important client to one of these servers and the bloody
> box crashed with a scsi timeout error on the console. It was rebooted
> and worked away until it crashed again with the same symptoms - we could
> ping it, but it wasn't serving pages, and we couldn't ssh to it.
>
> So, tomorrow I'll be having a rather fraught (I imagine) telecon with
> the people from Rackspace and I'm wondering what to say to them.
>
> Do any of you have any ideas about this, or have encountered anything
> remotely similar?
>

I had something similar on a Dell 1600SC box... problem went away
when we ran the SCSI bus as a U160 rather than U320.  Problem then went
away for good when the cable was replaced.

The interesting thing was that once the problem happened, it stayed
happened until the machine was rebooted, which made it look like a
firmware bug triggered by (in our case) a dodgy cable and high load.

Ronan