Re: system locks up when CD burn fails

[david@lang.hm]

On Thu, 13 May 2010, Borislav Petkov wrote:

> From: david@lang.hm
> Date: Wed, May 12, 2010 at 03:35:06PM -0700
>
>> I have a couple hundred boxes running kernels from 2.6.12 through
>> 2.6.33.3 that each burn a backup to a IDE CD-ROM once a week. Every
>> couple of months one of the boxes (_not_ the same one each time)
>> runs into some sort of error when burning the CD and the entire box
>> locks up (unable to toggle numlock even). I have not been able to
>> find any correlation between failures and anything on the system.
>>
>> when the system locks up it doesn't log anything, and the screen
>> just freezes in the middle of the cdrecord status (X of Y MB
>> written) with no error message.
>>
>> I'm actually not worried that much about the burn failing, The
>> problem is that the burn failing will take out the entire system. Is
>> there anything that I should be doing to make the systems more
>> robust in the face of such failures?
>
> Are you using the ide drivers or libata? If it is the first, try
> switching to libata to see whether this fixes your freezes.

most of the boxes are using the ide drivers. Unfortunantly the problem is 
very intermittent (every few thousand disks burned I get a problem)

I'm upgrading them all to 2.6.33.3 with the libata drivers within the next 
few days, so we'll see what happens over the next couple of months.

David Lang