[gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[James Colby]

List members -

I have a Gentoo install running inside of a vmware ESX server virtual
machine.  I am having a very strange issue though.  Every few days the
root filesystem will become read only and the only way that  I can fix
it is to reboot or power down the virual machine.  Does anyone have
any ideas as to what might be causing this?  I have searched through
the logs and the only errors tha I see regarding my root device
(/dev/sda3) seem to be coming from the FSCK that is done on reboot of
the sever.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
James
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Re: [gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[Richard Fish]

On 7/5/06, James Colby <jcolby@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a Gentoo install running inside of a vmware ESX server virtual
> machine.  I am having a very strange issue though.  Every few days the
> root filesystem will become read only and the only way that  I can fix
> it is to reboot or power down the virual machine.  Does anyone have
> any ideas as to what might be causing this?  I have searched through
> the logs and the only errors tha I see regarding my root device
> (/dev/sda3) seem to be coming from the FSCK that is done on reboot of
> the sever.

A disk timeout error could cause a filesystem to be remounted
read-only.  And if /var is on the same disk, you wouldn't necessarily
see the errors (since, after all, it is now read-only!).

I would start by making /var a separate filesystem if you haven't
already.  Heck, put it on a different virtual disk if you have to...

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[James Colby]

>
> A disk timeout error could cause a filesystem to be remounted
> read-only.  And if /var is on the same disk, you wouldn't necessarily
> see the errors (since, after all, it is now read-only!).
>
> I would start by making /var a separate filesystem if you haven't
> already.  Heck, put it on a different virtual disk if you have to...
>
> -Richard
> --

Richard -

Thanks for the suggestion.  I have moved /var to a separate virtual
disk.  Hopefully this will give me some clue as to why the root
filesystem keeps becoming read only.  If it does turnout to be a disk
timeout do you have any suggestions as how to fix the problem?

Thanks,
James
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Re: [gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[Enrico Weigelt]

* James Colby <jcolby@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion.  I have moved /var to a separate virtual
> disk.  Hopefully this will give me some clue as to why the root
> filesystem keeps becoming read only.  If it does turnout to be a disk
> timeout do you have any suggestions as how to fix the problem?

I also had an similar problem (on an physical machine) which I
couldn't reproduce. It seemed that the disk itself became ro for 
some reason. Unmounting and mouting again didnt help. It told me
the medium was ro, and so the fs got mounted ro, too.

Maybe your logfiles can show anythin strange happened on the 
disk (may an temporary problem on the host disk).

BTW: I've got some usermode-linux jail somewhere in the net, 
which randomly gets an ro root fs - I always have to ask the
provider to fix it (no idea what he actually does). A few 
days ago, the problem occoured again, and my provider told 
me there was an hw problem and he has to change the broken hw.

Maybe its the same kind of problem ?


cu
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Re: [gentoo-user] / becomes read only

[Richard Fish]

On 7/5/06, James Colby <jcolby@gmail.com> wrote:
> filesystem keeps becoming read only.  If it does turnout to be a disk
> timeout do you have any suggestions as how to fix the problem?

Well, it is a very big "if" at this point.  It is equally possible
that you have an bad block on the drive that causes an IO error, or a
corrupted filesystem block that confuses the filesystem driver, or...
Hopefully a log will get written to give us more info.

If linux were running on the bare metal, I could probably make some
suggestions on how to avoid a timeout appearing in the guest os
(schedulers, sysctl settings, etc); however I know nothing about ESX
server and what is available there for tuning.

You might post the problem to the vmware ESX forum and see what they
have to say.  The VMWare forums usually provide top-notch support for
these kind of things...

-Richard
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