[Q] Is errors=panic safe to use, and will it detect a RAID gone psycho?

Maurice Volaski mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Sun Jun 26 05:04:08 UTC 2005


I have had in years past seen hardware (SCSI) RAID controllers lose 
it electronically causing the kernel to fill the logs with scary SCSI 
messages and ext3 to complain about "holes" in the filesystem like so:

Sep  7 14:47:17 thewarehouse1 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device 
sd(8,81)): ext3_readdir: directory #376833 contains a hole at offset 0

I'm using drbd and heartbeat so whatever gets written to the hardware 
RAID gets written independently to a second RAID on a second 
computer. It would be nice if in the unlikely event hardware failed 
to cause something bad such as the one aforementioned to trigger the 
computer to fail entirely and force heartbeat/drbd to kick in on the 
second computer.

If I set the error behavior with tune2fs to panic, would this happen? 
That is, is this the type of error that would trigger a panic? Are 
there minor errors that could unnecessarily trigger one?
-- 

Maurice Volaski, mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University




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