On 10/26/07, Jake Conk  wrote:

quoted text
> On 10/25/07, Francesco Toscan  wrote:

> > 2007/10/26, Jake Conk :

> > > Hello,

> > >

> > > I was trying to restart my server and noticed it wasn't coming back

> > > online so when I went down to go take a look at it I was having a RAID

> > > problem. This is what was showing on the screen:

> > >

> > > ...

> > > PARTIALLY TRUNCATED INODE I=720

> > > THE FOLLOWING SYSTEM HAD AN UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY:

> > > [...]

> > > My question is what causes this? How can I be warned before a problem

> > > like this happens and what's the best way to prevent this from coming

> > > up? And lastly, is it possible in the worst case scenario if one of my

> > > disks is completely fsck'ed up is it possible to run the system on 1

> > > of the raid 1 disks until a second comes?

> >

> > Your problem is related to filesystem, not disks. For some reasons

> > your filesystem (on top of raid) was not properly unmounted: assuming

> > you didn't hard-reboot your server, this happened to me whith some IDE

> > devices which lied about commit of write operations. Even if my server

> > was rebooted normally, filesystem and disks were left in an

> > inconsistent state. Better SCSI disks solved the problem. Hardware has

> > become more crappy day by day.

>

> Thanks for your reply Francisco.

>

> > RAID in general keeps your system up if a disk fails, not if

> > filesystem on top of it screws up.

>

> If the filesystem is screwed up then shouldn't the raid just ignore it

> and run on 1 disk until I fix  the problem? That seems like the

> logical thing it should do unless all my mirrors of /var are messed

> up.

>

as Francesco said, this is not a RAID issue, and the above error is

not originated nor reported by RAIDFrame. If only mentions the

device on which the filesystem is: rraid0f. So it isn't clear why raid

should (could!) prevent that.
> Well anyways since it doesn't do that, some of my original questions

quoted text
> still stand. How can I be warned before a problem like this happens?

you can't be warned. Do fsck more often. You didn't mount your

filesystem async, did you?
> And lastly, is it possible in the worst case scenario if one of my

quoted text
> disks is completely fsck'ed up is it possible to run the system on 1

> of the raid 1 disks until a second comes?

yes. as long as this one doesn't break ;-)
BTW: if you use RAID to keep your system up, get familiar with what it

does and doesn't. Most problems arise not from hardware or system

failure, but from admin failure. Do backups.
--knitti