Zapped Linux - what to run to diagnose?
 

Hi,

I setup a samba fileserver on CentOS 4.4 a little while back for some people I know. Their office keeps having power cuts and surges, and despite my advice to get the electrics sorted and get a UPS, they ignored me and since the last surge the fileserver takes ages for network connections.


From experience, my bet is the NIC is probably zapped, but it still works, just reaaaaallly slowly but I don't know enough about Linux to know which diagnostic tests to run to prove it's the card.

Could anyone please point me in the right direction? I would be most grateful

Thanks

I Feel For Ya...
 

I deal with this crap all day long. I would just take 5 minutes to remove the card (or disable if on-board), and throw in another one. If that works, hooray! Of course, if it doesn't, there could really be a whole bunch of problems to check out, including perhaps even your switches.

At about 7:00 in the morning every day we run at about 25% when it comes to speed just because everybody is logging in at the same time, and at about 4:30, we go totally down once a week because we've got a loop that nobody can track down. So I understand where you are coming from, and I hope for your sake it's the NIC.

ha ha! I know where you are coming from. :)

Luckily, I have a spare NIC. I'll pop that in and see what happens. Thanks.

can you just try and see what the ping times are for the file server ? I'm thinking along the lines of cron or something set to run at various times (logon rush hours etc) to give you an idea whether it's a multiple users type problem though it's probably quicker to use/try the suggestion of swapping the NIC!

If you have sysstat installed /var/log/sa will have 5-minute reports of the state of your linux system.

You can use this to see what's changing at various intervals: ints/s, load avg, block I/O, network I/O, pages/s.