server crashing

[Bob Hutchinson]

Hi all,
hope this is the right list for this question...

We have a server running RH7.3 (patched with RHN to date apart from Kernel
which is 2.4.20-13.7). Apart from the software RAID being broken & the
machine running in degraded mode for several months) it has been reliable
until recently.

It has started crashing with a console screen full of kernel messages - for
the last 5 days - always at 4am, though we have been unable to see which of
the 4am cron jobs might be tipping it over (we HAVE looked and thought it
might be logwatch [5.0.1] which we are now turning off).

Messages are too long & hexy to copy all ... here are the gist:
<snip>
bread <kernel>
ext3_mark_iloc_dirty <kernel>
ext3_truncate   .....
.rodata   .....
__jbd_kmalloc  ....
start_this_handle   ....
journal_start  ...
start_transaction  ...
ext3_delete_inode  ...
iput  ...
notify_change  ...
d_delete  ...
vfs_unlink  ...
cached_lookup <kernel>
lookup_hash  ...
sys_unlink  ...
sys_close  ...
system_call ...

Code:    "strings of hex numbers all on one line ..."
</snip>

And that is it.

A hard RESET results in a reboot that hangs & drops into a shell - but
ANOTHER (second) hard RESET results in a successful & totally clean boot
(apart from the degraded raid messages and they appear on every boot).

We are baffled & do not know what is causing this or what we need to do.
Any help would be much appreciated as this is a busy server with over 1000
users on it.

Any help or pointers would be appreciated


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