[DRBD-user] Downgrading?

Stefan Löfgren stlo at dontdownload.com
Mon May 26 10:06:26 CEST 2008

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Hi list!

I've been monitoring the thread about the stable/unstable versions and so on
and do not wish to add to this discussion.

But, I have problems that might be related to this issue...

Background:
I've been testing with kernel 2.4.33.3 and DRBD 0.7.25 in virtual machines and
this is working just fine so far.

Now, in production I had to change to kernel 2.6.24.5 (due to hardware
compability-issues) and DRBD 8.2.5...
This setup turned out to be rather useless due to bugs in 8.2.5 (the ones
fixed in 8.0.12). So, went for 8.2.6rc1 and I was able to get the resource
running for more than 15 minutes.

Everything looked good. But now, 10 days later, I have a feeling that I was
mistaken. I'm having troubles with kernel-panics. I'm not able to find the
source of the problem, but can at least say that one of the crashes was
related to some failed kalloc-calls (and I think it was in DRBD, i've seen
this more than once)...

I'm not sure where to begin my search for errors. The system refuses
SHH-connections (all networkconnection for that matter). The secondary node is
working fine, but not the primary. This could in theory be connected with
other softwares running on the primary. These are:
Samba, svnserve, X and VMWare Workstation.
(well, the system does not panic right away but refuses connections and the
HDD-LEDs it lit all the time. And when I try to unmount and go into secondary
it crashes).

Yes, I know there's a red flag on vmware that uses kernel-modules. But the
other softwares are strictly in user-space and should not, in theory, cause
this kind of problems, right?

I tried to downgrade to kernel 2.4.x but the hardware was simply not
supported... :(

This is not a discussion whether to call 8.2.5 stable or not, it just didn't
work.... ;) And I really need to fix it or change platform (a good old rsync
once a day is better than crashes one a week)... I really love the idea with
DRBD and I would really love to get it running...

Any suggestions on what I should do? Downgrade to DRBD 8.0.12? Will this make
it better? Known issues? Known issues together with VMWare? Will rc2 make a
difference? Anyone else been running 2.6.24.x and DRBD 8.2.x with success
(DELL PowerEdge R200)? Maybe even kernel problems?


/Stefan







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