Andreas, Thanks for the reply. The assertion is easy enough to explain - ext3 reserves a fixed number of journal blocks to do a transaction, but as a result of the many errors that happen it runs out of reserved blocks while correcting the errors before it can complete the operation. I'm not sure whether that should be "fixed" or not (e.g. we could try to extend the transaction if we hit such an error case), because having so many errors is just asking for further corruption down the road. ^^^^ Granted - although the hanging process is a major nuisance - I could turn on reboot on panics although then I'd probably not notice that anything had happened! Well, any kind of prior error is usually a bad sign, because it could mean memory corruption, not enough free memory to do operations, etc. ^^^ Yeah I agree and they do worry me, although I've seen them on other boxes (very occasionally) and the box has continued on for months - I don't know if this is a 2.4.18 bug - I've seen others report it on linux.kernel. I'm loathed to change kernels to 2.4.20 as I've seen reports of ext3 errors introduced (however minor) - so I was going to wait for 2.4.21 (which I see is in pre form at the moment) before trying that out on a customer - however I have been using 2.4.21-pre11 on non-customer sites and that has appeared to be ok so that is a possibility - although I don't like trying out new kernels on customers to see if it 'cures' problems (not unless I have proven to myself that it cures a problem - but so far I've not reproduced this disk problem in the office!). One option is always to disable DMA on the IDE chipset in case that is a source of problems. Not to deny the possibility that the error is in ext3, but it is also possible that the problem is in the capture cards or drivers, or bad interaction on the PCI bus or something. ^^^^ Yeah it's a bit of a nightmare pinning the problem down - I've got boxes on other sites running under the same load (and higher) which have not shown any problems at all - same hardware. It is possible that we've got a run of bad boards - we bought 15 from the same supplier. It may be load related, if you are not stressing the box as much as the customers are... Is it possible to configure only a single capture card in a box for some period of time? ^^^ It's really only possible to do that in our office - generally we push the boxes just as hard as the customer will (harder in some cases) and try and let them run for as long as possible before shipping them out (1 week usually). Thanks again, Glen _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
