Netraid 2M / Linux File Coppuption

[Paul S_1]

I have installed here a HP Netserver LC 2000 which contains a NetRaid 2 card with 5 drives attached as a Raid 5 array (one hot spare). The problem is, when the logical device is mounted and data is written to it the file system becomes corrupt. Is there a specific way to set this file system / array up to keep this from happening? Oracle is to live on this partition.

Any information is greatly appreciated.

[Eric Ladner]

Sounds like it could be a problem with the netraid card.

Also, some cards have a writethrough option to force writes to the disk. This might (maybe) fix the problem if it's turned on. You'd want to enable this anyway if you were running Oracle on it, since your primary goal at that point is data consistancy in the event of power/hardware failure.

[Kodjo Agbenu · Accepted solution]

Hello Paul,

This is a well-known issue with HP NetRaid 1m/2m cards with certain versions of Linux "megaraid" driver.

In linux-2.2.x, things were 32-bit and it worked well.

With linux-2.4.x, things are 64-bit and may reveal some bugs. This is the case with the firmware of that NetRaid cards.

To avoid having filesystem corruption, just use the right "megaraid.o" driver version. If you are using RedHat distro, go to netserver.hp.com, then support, and try to find the driver disk for HP Netservers with 1m/2m.

To check if you have a kernel that fixes this bug, edit the /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/megaraid.c, and find the version of the driver : it should be at least 1.15c. As far as I know, things work well starting at 2.4.10.

Good luck.

Kodjo

[Paul S_1]

Yes, the system is running kernel 2.2.19 who's megaraid driver is version 1.11 (states 1b08b).

My next step was upgrading to version 7.2 of the operating system.

We only used RH 6.2 because 7.2 was not released at the time and 7.1 was unstable.

I'm not sure what we had done before but the system ran for about 6-7 months stable then died. Must have been luck and luckly it wasnt a production system.

Thanks for all the help.

[Domenico Viggiani]

I have similar problems with Redhat 7.2 (and all updates from Redhat installed).
Under heavy load, disk gets corrupted.

Mimmus