Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Accessing raid mount via samba crashes!


GarenTsen
01-10-2005, 10:55 AM
Hi all!

I've just bought a new s-ata raid controller (Hightpoint 1640) and four 200 GB s-ata disks of the same brand (Maxtor).

My goal is to set it up as a big volume in raid0 for maximum speed (and I know, no parity).

I've used raidtools to create this array and I can create the filesystem, ext3, and mount it as such:
mount /dev/md0 /share

So far all is great. My next step was to share this mount via samba and do some speed testing from a WinXP workstation. The problem arises when I copy a larger file. Suddenly, often just after a few seconds, the linux server crashes totally. Looking in dmesg after bootup again I can see nothing special that caused the crash.

The strange thing is that if I copy a file locally, from the boot disk not part of the raid array, to the array, it works. The crashing only seems to happen when writing files via samba.

I’ve tried to create the array manually and with fedora core 3 installation tools. I’ve also tried the driver supplied by Highpoint which I managed to compile and load in Slackware 10 in 2.4.x kernel. Same problem. I’ve even tried the new Ubuntu distro (my current favourite) and the exact same problem arises.

When booting I’ve sometimes seen an errormessage that hde got some error regarding to sync and errorcode 0x58 but searching the net this seems to do with DMA issues. I can’t see how this could cause a total, non-responsive, crash.

In desperation I’m now installing win2000 server to see if there might be a problem with the raid controller or one of the disks. In the meantime I’d like to hear any suggestions you might have regarding this issue. I’m stunned at the moment, and quite sad that I can’t get this to work!

Thanks

/Emil

blobaugh
01-13-2005, 09:56 PM
how big was the file? samba only works with files up to 3gigs. i dont think it woud 'crash' the server, but it may

GarenTsen
01-14-2005, 08:40 AM
the file was about 700MB, and I've tried smaller as well. It usually crashes after 20-30MB copied.

I've now installed Windows 2000 server (as a temporary solution) and there everything works fine. I can copy files to and from the server in speeds of about 35-40MB per second. So the disks are working fine.

Any more ideas of what could cause this fatal crash in linux?

BTW: I've had files of about 4.7GB on a samba share without any problems, I'm not sure that the file size restriction applies to Samba 3?

blobaugh
01-17-2005, 07:26 AM
you may be correct in saying that the filesize limit is no longer a problem with the newest samba release. i have not yet looked at the changelog on it.

so i assume you totally wiped out linux on that box? a possiblity i may suggest is dual booting till you get the problems worked out, or temporarily relocating the server files to a different machine that you know works. did you check in /var/log/ for any samba related information? is your smb.conf file setup correctly? run 'testparm' to test the smb.conf file. before you had the drives in a raid array, was it still crashing?

i know thats not really much help. let us know a little more though and maybe we can. and think about updating samba. it is quite possible that the version that can with your fedora core has a fatal bug in it