My database server had a strange error. It went into some kind of read-only mode. The system was not even able to write to the log file.

The system has been running great for over 3 months when this occured.
There is plenty of free hard drive space(only using 3%) and otherwise the system is in good health.

Can anyone help me explan this? Is it some kind of safty procedure the system will go into in the event of a problem? Please help me find an explantion

What happens if you reboot,or otherwise unmount/remount the filesystem? Anything indicative in the logs?

rebooted and the system is fine
all the log entries look fine up untill this happened and of course after nothing could be logged. This is the 2nd time this has happened, the last time was back in early Dec. I just need something to tell my boss

Hardware failure, perhaps? if you have smartmontools installed you could do smartctl -a /dev/hdx to look at smart info. AFAIK there isn't anything that could make a running system go into read-only mode..but then i ain't an expert either

This AM suddenly I couldn't vi or man anything.. it says 'read only file system'

I did a sudo fsck -n whereupon it says
/dev/hda1 contains a file system with errors, check forced.

so I poked around, trying to find the last guy that
could write to the system.. I just installed a brother
printer(mfc420cn) last night and used CUPS to print a test page at about the time it suddenly stopped writing anything to the log..
Where would the kernel write something if it switched
my file system? well, before it switched it?
thks

Distro: Debian 2.6.7
CPU: Armada 7400 (Deschutes PII, I think it says)
HD: 40 Gig Hitachi

After reading
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=429624

I tried

sudo /sbin/sfdisk -l
Password:
sudo: Can't mkdir /var/run/sudo/edw: File exists
2006-03-31 13:19:02 1FPR1K-00039A-00 Cannot open main log file "/var/log/exim/mainlog": Read-only file system: euid=8 egid=8
2006-03-31 13:19:02 1FPR1K-00039A-00 Cannot open main log file "/var/log/exim/mainlog": Read-only file system: euid=8 egid=8
exim: could not open panic log - aborting: original error above

Disk /dev/hda: 77504 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
for C/H/S=*/255/63 (instead of 77504/16/63).
For this listing I'll assume that geometry.
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 0+ 4831 4832- 38813008+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 4832 4862 31 249007+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/hda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty


where is the panic log? maybe the kernel wrote there
before switching my filesystem to read-only as I see
in /etc/fstab that it has the errors=mount-ro option.

and I was a real newbie when I installed the potatoe release back in '04.. and (s)he fired up the drivers
that could 'see' this 40 Gig EIDE .. is sfdisk telling
me that the partition table shuld be fixed?

thanks


Ed

PS: No I haven't rebooted yet, still learning stuff

Okay after running fsck -c /dev/hda

I didn't do what it said ****REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER***

instead I did
sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda1 /

and I am still running Linux is a run always system!