RHEL 3 on VMware chrashed, resulting in "directory contains a hole" messages

[Johan Booysen]

I've also seen this, but only on Vmware Server.  I recently wanted to
move a VM between servers, and in the past I've noticed that a VM
including a snapshot sometimes doesn't like to be moved.  So I usually
remove the snapshot first, then move, then snapshot it again if
necessary.  On this occasion, after removing the snapshot, it would
start up.  I had to point the VM at an older virtual disk file, which
essentially reverted it back to the way it was at the time of the
snapshot, losing recent changes.

It doesn't make for a good night's sleep, that's for sure.

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Holter
Sent: 26 August 2009 10:45
To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Subject: Re: RHEL 3 on VMware chrashed, resulting in "directory contains
a hole" messages

Thanks for your reply.

In the Vmware VC console, I located the server in question, clicked
"manage
snapshots", and clicked the snapshot and the hit the "delete" button.
Basically the same procedure I've done a thousand times before, only
this
time it caused the linux server to crash. I've seen this a few times
before,
actually, but haven't been able to find the reason why the linux server
crashes. It must be a bug within Vmware, or with Linux on Vmware, that's
causing it. Have anyone else experienced this before?

We were not able to rescue the server that crashed yesterday, so we
decided
to migrate to a new RHEL 5 server which was allready a planned activity.
But
I must say that I'm a bit worried about running linux on Vmware having
had a
few (maybe four or five) servers crashing on me the past year and a half
I've been running RHEL on vmware. So if anyone knows how to debug these
issues to increase the stability I'd greatly appreciate it.
Unfortunately, I
haven't got very much data to analyze, so I could use some advice on how
to
retrieve such data the next time a linux server crashes.


Regards,
Kenneth


On 8/25/09, Josh Miller <joshua at itsecureadmin.com> wrote:
>
> Kenneth Holter wrote:
>
>> One of our RHEL 3 servers (it's scheduled to be replaced withing
weeks)
>> just
>> crashed, and I could use some advice on how to get it up and running.
>>
>> It's running as an Vmware ESX 3.5 guest, and chrashed when I removed
a
>> snapshot earlier today. If I understand correctly it lost contact
with the
>> virtual disks or something of that kind, resulting in this type of
message
>> in syslog:
>>
>>
>> * kernel: EXT3-fs error (device lvm(58,0)): ext3_readdir: directory
>> #1724801 contains a hole at offset 3014656
>>
>
> How exactly did you remove the snapshot?
>
>
> --
> Josh Miller, RHCE/VCP
> Seattle, WA
> Linux Solutions Provider
> Website:  http://itsecureadmin.com/
>
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