Mysterious hangs with Fedora

[Brian Chase]

rbp at netcanvas.com wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I'm experiencing a very weird situation with FC1.
> 
> I have this machine that was upgraded from RH9 to FC1, using yum. Everything
> worked fine, no problem there.
> When running RH9, this machine was rock solid and only rebooted for kernel
> updates. But with FC1, the problems began.
> 
> The machine completely hangs, with no apparent reason whatsoever, at no specific
> time. I tried lots of kernels.. my usual custom vanilla+grsec and RH9's 2.4.18
> and Fedora's latest NPTL kernel. That appears to make no difference. However,
> there was this occasion when i noticed the machine hanged two days in a row at
> exactly the same time, when running cron.daily (updatedb?!). But i never got to
> reproduce that sistematically. Yesterday i stressed tested it with a full
> backup (tar+gzip) and kernel compilations at the same time. Went great. Then i
> went to bed, to find in the morning it crashed around 30mins after that test,
> when idle.. I can have a week uptime, or 3 hangs in a day, depends on it's
> mood. The machine does pretty much the same thing all the time: mail and web,
> nothing fancy and nothing else.
> 
> The hardware is a Tyan 1U rackmount, 2.4 P4, 1GB DDR, two 120GB IDE disks in
> RAID1 (Promise FastTrack controller onboard). Hardware worked before for
> months, no problem. All fans ok, so overheating does not seem like a
> possibility. The only changed variable is the upgrade from RH9 to FC1. However,
> same behaviour with very different kernels, that also confuses me. Some quirk
> with glibc maybe?
> 
> Anyone here experiencing something similar? Any thoughts? Before i switch back
> to RH9 and see if it helps..
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> 

Promise Fastrack RAID is your culprit.

Forget using any parallel ATA RAID product made from Promise with Linux. 
  I've been round and round this subject, and the best they give you is 
source code, but how can you build the source when there's no drive 
recognized.  I recommend going to 3WARE for any ATA RAID (SATA or 
parallel) with Linux.

I hear that Promise SATA is supported in the kernel by default, but if 
you've got what I think you've got, you're probably want to use the 
on-motherboard Promise RAID chipsets.  This server is best relegated to 
becoming a Windows server if you want RAID with the Promise chipset.

Select your hardware carefully.....

BC