FS#5984 - Local partitions spontaneously unmount themselves

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Jason L (Hypocee) - Monday, 11 December 2006, 15:57 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category System
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture not specified
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7.2 Gimmick
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

I'm running a Samba server for a small business. It's on a PII-266 box with 64MB of RAM; old Gateway, nice generic components. The max load I've ever seen is 10% CPU and RAM usage. Three partitions are mounted on /someshare, /someshare/directory1 and /someshare/directory2. All are ext3 partitions on normal ATA/IDE drives. I don't use Unstable software, and the installation's very slim - Samba, sudo, that's about it. A week or two ago I upgraded the OS from Ubuntu to Arch (which I'm using on four other boxes). Since then, an average of once a day the partitons have spontaneously unmounted themselves. Conditions vary - sometimes it's after work when nobody's on, sometimes twice in one day, sometimes there'll be three days without a problem. One common thread is that it's never been caused by me messing around - I don't touch this box if I can avoid it and haven't been logged into the system on any of the occasions, let alone doing anything as root.

I don't think it's a Samba issue - when the drives unmount Samba happily shows the now-empty directory. The drives remount without complaint, and oddly they don't demand a filesystem check due to an unclean unmount. The root and boot partitions remain mounted and the system keeps running.

I know this is vague. I welcome any ideas on how to narrow down the issue. My gut says kernel - the issue doesn't occur on my other Arch boxes and upgrading the kernel via pacman-Syu has reduced but not eliminated the problem.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Roman Kyrylych (Romashka)
Tuesday, 06 February 2007, 17:30 GMT
Reason for closing:  None
Comment by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Tuesday, 06 February 2007, 10:36 GMT
Does your problem still exists with new kernel?
Comment by Jason L (Hypocee) - Tuesday, 06 February 2007, 15:27 GMT
I'm sorry, but we eventually just abandoned the box and bought a new one. We found that while processor and RAM were happy, the database app we were running was working the drives like crazy. I'm sure the problem was related to some combination of errors from the drives and the Arch kernel. My main concern is that I would have expected mount to give me something in error logs, but as far as I can tell it didn't. That's probably not something Arch can affect.

I'd say this should probably be closed under "hardware abuse". Sory for the bother, it was just such a weird problem that it might trigger a dev's memory.

Loading...