[mythtv-users] Kernel errors

[Michael Watson]

On 18/04/2012 10:35 AM, Frank Phillips wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 7:07 PM, Jerry Rubinow <jerrymr at gmail.com 
> <mailto:jerrymr at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Mark Lord <mythtv at rtr.ca
>     <mailto:mythtv at rtr.ca>> wrote:
>
>         On 12-04-16 11:36 PM, Jerry Rubinow wrote:
>         > My mythbackend computer locked up today, the whole computer,
>         not just mythbackend.  Following is the
>         > syslog at the time this happened.  It's been rock steady for
>         months, and I haven't made any changes
>         > lately.  I rebooted and now it seems to be functioning normally.
>         >
>         > Any suggestions for what I should do?  Is this a sign of
>         disk errors?
>         ..
>
>         No, not with the scanty information provided.
>         If there are disk errors, then there will be kernel logs along
>         with them.
>
>         Also, "smartctl -a /dev/sdX" will give very good information
>         about the error state of the drives.
>
>
>     Thanks Mark.  kern.log had the same info as syslog, and smartctl
>     wasn't revealing.  Sorry for the scanty info, but I'm not sure
>     what direction to look.
>
>     Once more piece of data is that I saw a very high load before it
>     completely locked up, but the top items in top were not using much
>     cpu.
>
>
>  That high load is caused by IO wait, which you can see in top as %wa. 
> The longer the disk takes to complete a task, the more processes 
> backup in the queue, causing a high load to be reported. Look closely 
> at your disk, as it most likely has issues.
>
I find "smart" almost useless with physical problems on hard drives.  I 
find hddtemp in combination with a logging function like cacti or mrtg 
to show up physical hard drives better.  (The temperature tends to go 
high when the disk is having physical issues)

Try a 'cat /var/log/syslog | grep sdX'.  Might reveal something.  You 
might want to go through each of your hard drives (sda, sdb, etc) if you 
have more than one.