[NTLUG:Discuss] Debian Web Server Error

[Chris Cox]

On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 15:03 -0600, Dennis Myhand wrote:
> I have built a web server using Debian Lenny as a test box to set up 
> some different types of websites using LAMP, this being for my school 
> and for my hardware class students.  Lately I have been having trouble 
> accessing the webmin interface (I have a installed a blog, a forum, a 
> moodle install, a Mambo install, and webmin to show my students what can 
> be done with simple hardware and Open Source/Free Software) to manage 
> the sites.  I shut down today when this happened and logged the 
> following error:
> 
> [808804.8566641] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 13533247
> (this went on line upon line for over three hours when I tried to shut down)

That sounds like a bad drive.  If it's relatively new... I'm betting
it's a Seagate drive :)

> 
> I looked this up on the intarwebs and found a site which advised doing 
> the following:
> 
> dmesg | grep sda > dmesg.txt

dmesg is a ring buffer... more likely you'll have these in a file
coming from the system logger (usually in /var/log).

> 
> Below is the output of that command string.  

Nothing to see...  not seeing the errors there.  Not sure what is going
on.  Would be nice to see the sector errors inside of a log file.  Might
reveal much.

If you're drive is SMART capable, you might want to use smartctl to
examine if the drive is erroring or not.