[debian-non-standard] Strange file system error

[Mikael Nordlin]

If I may share my experience with Debian on devices, for what it's  
worth:

More than a year ago, I managed to upgrade a Slug with Debian Lenny,  
from a USB stick. It still runs rock solid today, and primarily serves  
asterisk 1.4. This is my only Debian experience, my routers run  
OpenWRT today, and a very positive one.

I also had a spare router, a Freecom FSG-3 with a very poor WLAN card  
(Marvell based). This I tried to get running on Debian using Tomasz  
Chmielewski's guide (and images of course) successfully to some  
extent. It booted from the stick, but irrecoverable boot media erfors  
were produced. I was not able to fix the problem, and the router type  
was dead then already. I did find however suggestions that a newer  
kernel (2.6.18 was what I had I think) and I have never compiled à  
kernel. So I gave up.

I'm not sure, but was it the IDE drivers that were producing false  
errors under load on this particular platform?

I hope you get your system running. If you do I'm sure I'll give My  
old FSG à new chance.

Thank you all for your contributions to this project!

Mikael Nordlin

13 apr 2010 kl. 23.44 skrev Sven Nieslony <sven.nieslony at netviewer.com>:

> Hi all,
>
>>> Do a write test on all surface, with:
>>>
>>> badblocks -v -w /dev/sdX
>
> A few days later here my results:
>
> Badblocks didn't find any errors on my USB stick after running on my  
> computer.
> So I've tried again, flashed again the kernel to be sure and copied  
> the root file system to the USB stick.
> After 3 hours the tmp folder vanished and made the system going mad.
> asus-debian:~# ls -alh /
> total 80K
> drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Apr  6  2010 .
> drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Apr  6  2010 ..
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4.0K Apr  4  2007 bin
> [...]
> drwxr-xr-x 10 root root    0 Jan  1 01:00 sys
> ?---------  ? ?    ?       ?            ? tmp
> drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4.0K Mar 14  2006 usr
> drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4.0K Nov  1  2006 var
> asus-debian:/# file /tmp
> /tmp: ERROR: cannot open `/tmp' (Input/output error)
>
> Immediately after unplugging the USB stick I checked it with the  
> computer and everything was there. A fsck gave me no result and  
> rsyncing (with -avn option) the stick with the extracted tar showed  
> only the usual files (e.g. some files in /var) had changed.
>
> It looks like the router is having problems reading/writing the USB  
> stick.
>
> I had another idea to verify this:
> I took a new USB stick and made it the root file system, attached  
> the old one (which was OK after checking with badblocks on my  
> computer and which passed the fsck) and did a badblocks check from  
> the router.
> With the first pattern there were almost 500 errors; with the second  
> pattern multiple thousand errors...
>
> Now I did a final check:
> Once again the kernel flashed, file system on the new stick and  
> another try - just booting and leaving the router untouched (no  
> login, almost no I/O...). After one night there was no more ping  
> from the router. I checked the stick an it was broken.
>
> In result one broken stick (fortunately an advertising gift) and one  
> broken router. :-(
>
> Afterwards I borred me an Asus WL-500GP which we had used in the  
> company as openwrt VPN router and started another try:
> This one is up and running since Saturday with almost no issues -  
> after having generated the de_DE.UTF-8 locale which took about 10  
> minutes the /home folder vanished and it gave me the same result  
> like described above but a forced fsck with mounted file system  
> resulted only with one lost inode. I recreated the /home folder and  
> had no problem since then
>
> Seems to that a high load will cause the routers to have I/O errors  
> on the USB ports.
>
> I've bought a new WL-500GP on ebay (I found a brand new one for a  
> really good price :-) ) and will start a new try!
>
> Thanks for your help and have much fun with your Asus!
>
> Sven
>
> --- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Easy Software Deployment >> http://wpkg.org
> _______________________________________________
> debian-non-standard mailing lists
> debian-non-standard at lists.wpkg.org
> http://lists.wpkg.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-non-standard