Re: [gentoo-user] Serious stability problems, including freezes

[Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net>]

Alexander Puchmayr schrieb:
> Hi there!
> 
> My freshly setup homeserver has serious stability problem, which make the 
> the machine absolutely unuseable as home server. 
> 
[...]
> 
> The problem is, when I copy large amount of data via nfs to the server, then 
> the logs get filled with entries like this:
> 
[...]
>
> Sometimes its kswap0, nfsd, swapper, and a lot of other progs causing it. 
> 
> However, the systems runs without any problem until it has enough physical 
> memory. If I copy larger amounts of data (e.g. typical dvd-iso images of 
> ~4GB), then the log gets filled. Today's output was >65MB :-(
> So far, I think these messages are just annoying but do no further harm. 
> 
> The second problem is that the network controler (rtl8169) seems to timeout 
> on TX, which is very bad if it happens during renewing your dhcp-lease :-( 
> the message looks like
> 
[...]
>
> I don't know whether the first issue has anything todo with the second one.
> 
> The worst thing however is an occasional freeze of the whole system, which 
> happens very likely when there is high network load over nfs. If that 
> happens, I have a blank console, no network, no keyboard, nothing. Not even 
> sysrq seems to work, which makes it pretty hard to tell what has happened. 
> After resetting the machine, there is nothing suspicious in the logs (it 
> just ends).
> 
> Does anyone have suggestions?
> 

Do you have a spare network adapter, maybe an older 100MBit PCI card?
Maybe we should rule out a hardware fault on your ethernet chipset first.