[mythtv-users] OT. Howto diagnose machine dying/crashing

[list at onnow.net]

Quoting Phill Edwards <philledwards at gmail.com>:

>> Let me take a wild guess - you're using xfs, aren't you?
>>
>> There's going to be a lot of people on this list with high praise for xfs,
>> but on a 2.6 kernel with 4k stacks, there's a high likelihood of oopsing the
>> kernel, especially when layered with raid and nfs.  ext3 works just fine
>> with myth, and it's *stable*.
>>
>> http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2005-07/msg00041.html
>
> I was getting lockups on a machine running xfs and FC3 and like you NO
> logs to help. I then bought a new disk and installed FC5 and jfs
> instead of xfs and I'm not getting lockups any more. Of course there
> are a lot of variables changed there - new disk, new o/s, new
> filesystem so I'm not saying xfs was the cause. But I'd been
> struggling with it for months and was coming to the conclusion that
> xfs may have been the culprit. I was tempted to just change xfs to jfs
> to see if that was the cause but I decided to go the whole hog.
>
> PS - I believe ext3 does handle large file deletes quickly now so you
> may want to try that instead. But so far jfs has been great for me and
> I've read other good reports about its stability on this mailing list
> too.
>
> Regards,
> Phill
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I have now switched my /video ( 700 gigs ) to ext3.  I have been  
pounding on it with I/O and so far so good.  The next couple of weeks  
will tell.

Mark