Re: [PLUG] Kernel Troubles

[Will Dyson <will_dyson@pobox.com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 21:22, Bradley Molnar wrote:

> I'm not totally sure what the problem was, but, I did notice a couple of
> lines in /var/log/messages.*, namely,
> 
> Aug 29 04:02:01 guardian kernel: EIP is at find_inode [kernel] 0x24
> (2.4.20-8)
> Aug 29 04:02:01 guardian kernel: [<f8822d5c>] ext3_lookup [ext3] 0x7c
> (0xc7fe1eb4))

That is an Oops report. The kernel dereferenced a null pointer or some
other Bad Thing. When this happens, the kernel's execption handler kills
the process that called into the kernel and prints a backtrace of the
kernel stack to the syslog.

So we can see that the kernel was executing the find_inode function
(which was called from ext3_lookup) when things went to hell.

In your case, it sounds like some vital kernel datastructure was
corrupted before the kernel noticed anything was wrong, causing the
machine to hang at some later time.

It could well be a bad disk that is the ultimate cause of the problem.
All filesystems that I know of basicaly trust their own on-disk
datastructures. If it read corrupted metadata, it would doubtless cause
a crash. Perhaps you should try fscking the filesystem on that disk.

But I also vaguely recall that 2.4.21 fixed a problem or two with ext3.
Since your uptime is shot anyway, you might consider upgrading.

-- 
Will Dyson
"Back off man, I'm a scientist!" -Dr. Peter Venkman

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