Hardy 8.04.3 spontaneously goes "Read Only"
 

All,

I have had a new problem that just started this past Sunday, Aug 29 where the filesystem goes to "read only" all by itself. We have made some changes to the host (same distro) to activate the 2nd NIC (assign DNS, etc). Prior to that the system has been running fine with over 5 months uptime no problems. The environment is an Ubuntu host on VMware with 2 Ubuntu guest VM's, one running postgres and the other RoR.

I found something similar here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mic...rnalId=1002526

but I don't know exactly what is going on, or what may be causing this. The first occu0rrence was this past Sunday morning, sometime between 04:30 and 08:00, followed by a 2nd occurrence late Last night, Wednesday, September 1 sometime around 21:00. In both cases I rebooted the VM and the drives mounted according to the fstab as rw and all was fine for the time being. The interval was about 3-1/2 days, so if this is a pattern I would expect the next occurrence sometime on Saturday.

If anyone has ever heard of this, or can offer some suggestions avenues for troubleshooting, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Bill

Can you give us more details on the hardware as well please?
Also, include and lsmod output and scsi driver versions.

I had a similar problem using an out of date mptsas driver. I could predict when
the system would become read-only based on server usage, and as you suggest, the problem
went away after a reboot.

Thanks for the reply...
 

It's been a week and no occurrence yet, so I will post the lsmod listing and the scsi driver version very shortly, as well as some other anecdotal information. Maybe something will fit.

Bill

kelleysislander,

I haven't heard from you. Have you had any success?

Yeah! Thanks a lot for asking...
 

Here's what I figured out:

3 days before this all started we installed a 2nd NIC into the host box (VMWare ESX) and assigned it an IP Address. Apparently the IP address, due to some peculiarities (problems) in our network, was unreachable most of the time.

I had read where a bug in 7.0.4 and VMWare could cause a filesystem to go read-only if it became unreachable for a period of time. Well, I had 8.04 and figured that was close enough.

I uninstalled the 2nd NIC, restored the system to its exact state as before, and crossed my fingers. That was 2 weeks ago and we haven't had a problem since. Prior to the problem the system ran since inception (about 6 months) without a problem.

So for now it looks like all is well.

Thanks again,

Bill

Glad to hear it. Good luck.