OT? PE2850 + 3 x PERC3Q + 12 x PV220S + reiserfs = sad machine

[Andrew Moore]

Hi.

Perhaps a little OT for poweredge, but it is all poweredge kit and I was
wondering if the PERC3/QC was the problem....

Simply put linux box crashes as I mount all the drives... (okay that sounds
too simple)

I have a linux 2.6.17 (FC5) PE 2850 with a pair of 3.x GHz CPUs (HT turned
on); 4GB in the machine.

3 PERC3/QC cards in the expansion chassis each card running 4 PV220S, 8
logical disks on each PV220S made up as a RAID5 consisting of 7 disks (300GB
disks throughout)

the filesystem on all these is reiserfs, moderate quantities of files but
essentially most arrays are full (1.7TB x 24)


I've recently gone from a total of 22 logical volumes to 24 logical volumes
and now the system will crash in a fairly fatal and nasty way (hard crash
non-redoverable fantasitlcally difficuly to workout what went wrong, remote
console is useless; the frame buffer is full of a stack printout(?) but not
clear on what/where. This occurs whenever I attempt to mount all the large
disks.

I have attempted to cycle through all the disks mounting and umounting them
with the hope that I can identify a bad reiserfs volume - no success, the
system is fine when a limited number of disks are mounted.

I have attempted to mount disks in different orders - no help

I suspect I'm running over some glorious limit somewhere.

Any thoughts most appreciated,
andrew.