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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.eng.convex.com!hermes.oc.com!news.unt.edu!cs.utexas.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!EU.net!peer-news.britain.eu.net!ukc!crane.ukc.ac.uk!K.R.Marshall From: K.R.Marshall@ukc.ac.uk (Keith Marshall) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: The wonders of power cuts Date: Wed, 24 Jan 96 13:49:41 GMT Organization: University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Lines: 65 Sender: K.R.Marshall@ukc.ac.uk Message-ID: <804@crane.ukc.ac.uk> Reply-To: K.R.Marshall@ukc.ac.uk (Keith Marshall) NNTP-Posting-Host: crane.ukc.ac.uk Hi all, I'm just wondering if anyone has any extra ideas on this little problem I have. As far as I can see it is probably the Adaptec card that is slightly damaged, but I can't prove it. We run a Viglen 486 DX4 75 PCI computer with 8 Mb RAM, 250Mb western digital hard disk, SMC Elite ethernet card, Diamond Stealth 64 graphics card (but I'm not running X - it just came with the PC) and an Adaptec 1542CF controller with 7 Toshiba CD-ROM drives chained. This acts as a CD-ROM and file-server across a Sun PC-NFS network. It's been running FreeBSD 2.0.5-R fine for several months now. It's been extremely stable, we've had no trouble whatsoever. A couple of weeks ago we had a power cut when some workmen cut through a set of power cables in Canterbury. Ever since it's been crashing regularly (every couple of hours or so) with the following error messages: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode Fault virtual address = 0x4a Fault code = supervisor read, page not present instruction pointer = 0x8:0xf01244ec Code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1 processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL=0 Current process = 79 (nfsd) Interrupt mask = bio Panic: page fault syncing disks... 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 (maybe some more 2's) giving up. Now, the process isn't always nfsd, and those sync numbers aren't always "2". I can force a crash by downloading huge amounts of data from a CD-ROM (i.e. by copying a huge file across NFS), but it sometimes crashes just when doing large amounts of hard disk I/O. I re-installed the OS to start with, using 2.1.0-R, since there was very little stuff on there that wasn't easily replaceable and I wanted to check that the swap space hadn't been corrupted. This had no effect. I then thought of the memory, so I tried changing the SIMMS with an identical Viglen, and that didn't solve it. I disabled the external cache, but that didn't solve it. I tried running without the Adaptec card in, and it didn't crash, but I have no sure way of testing it other than trying huge amounts of disk I/O so I don't know if that was comprehensive. The adaptec internal diagnostic checks run fine, but they only test DMA transfers. The only other SCSI cards I have around are Future Domain ones, which won't work with FreeBSD, so I can't swap the card. I'm just about at the stage of ordering a new Adaptec card to see if that's the problem, but I was wondering if anyone else could suggest something to try. Sorry about the length of this post - it's turned out a trifle longer than I was expecting ;) Keith. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Mummy was an asteroid, Daddy was a | Keith Marshall small, non-stick kitchen utensil..." | Computing Officer, Templeman Library - Quiet Sun, 1975 | University of Kent at Canterbury.