I recently bought a new machine from Layeredtech for my commercial mail anti spam system and am having endless troubles with it. I have a similar machine at Hetzner also running CentOS 5 and it too is having problems, though less frequently.
The short of it is that the drives disconnect, file systems go read only and the box needs a reboot:
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x4) ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xca Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout) ata1: soft resetting port ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310) ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec) ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4) ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 226813249 Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27835568 lost page write due to I/O error on sda3 sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 227360961 Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27904032 lost page write due to I/O error on sda3
So in an effort to figure out if this is a CentOS 5 problem – both ISPs certify CentOS 4 on their hardware – I needed to get my application going on CentOS 4. This turned out to be quite a mission involving getting Exim with MySQL and the recently integrate exiscan rather than the patched version.
I looked at the various options and decided to just backport CentOS 5’s Exim package to CentOS 4.
As it turns out I haven’t yet had a machine re-installed with CentOS 4 as I found some posts suggesting some kernel parameters that might fix things, I’ve applied these now to the machines and wait.
My Exim RPMs can be found below:
exim-4.63-3.src.rpm
exim-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-mon-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-sa-4.63-3.i386.rpm
As with the CentOS 5 ones you’ll need various DB client libraries installed as this supports speaking to Postgres, MySQL, SQLite etc.
This should be useful to anyone who just wants a more recent version of Exim on their CentOS/RedHat 4 machines.
