Subj : Server crashing To : LEONARD ERICKSON From : Ian Moote Date : Tue Nov 07 2000 03:20 am LE> And merely opening the directory in either of the above cases causes LE> *heavy* disk activity, even if I don't do anything else. You must have yours set to automatically create thumbnails. I just took a quick look around but I don't have PMView installed at the moment, but now that you mention it I seem to recall seeing such an option. The few times that I install and use it, it doesn't create thumbnails for me automatically. (I forget what version I've got archived here.) LE> IM> Does the system crash without an error message? LE> LE> I think the message the last time was something about a page fault LE> error. Page fault!? Eeewww. Well... I think that the first thing that I would do here would be to just make sure that the memory is okay. I would do this by running a memory diagnostic, but I don't know what you have available to you. If you don't have a diagnostic tool, you can completely replace the memory (like from another machine), or if it's in such a configuration that would allow you to move it around, that might give you some kind of positive indication of some kind of memory-related problem. Or just double-check that all the memory modules are seated properly. Now, the memory may not be the problem, and may not even be the most likely source of the problem, but it's easy to test if you have a tool to do so, and it basically costs you nothing to do. What I'm thinking here is that if you do have bad memory somewhere you may not have noticed it because the bad area isn't being used regularly. But when those two operations are being performed simultaneously then so much memory is being used that you're treading into the area of bad memory and a page fault is being triggered. Hey -- do you have parity or ECC memory installed? Other than that you'd be looking at software. And if the page fault is on the server then it would be in the Netware end of things somewhere. The rote reply in that case is usually "do you have the latest service pack installed?". LE> I'f pretty sure that I'm on the right track as those two activities LE> are the *only* thing all those crashes have in common. Seems pretty reasonable. LE> IM> Another diagnostic thing that you might try is to split all of LE> IM> the EA's from the suspect files. You can always merge them back LE> IM> later if need be. (Using "eautil", I mean.) LE> LE> How exactly do I do that? Okay. I'm sure you already realize this, but just for the sake of clarity: If you suspect that the problem may be triggered by the extended attributes, then remove the extended attributes _before_ the copy is performed. (I know: common sense [:) There is a utility called "eautil" that allows you to do this and it comes with OS/2. To split EA's from a file, the general syntax of the command is: EAUTIL filename /S If all of the files are in the same directory you can use: FOR %A IN (*.*) DO EAUTIL %A /S (Or make sure to use "%%A" in a batch or cmd file.) Using this syntax of the command, all of the extended attributes will be split from the file, placed in a directory called "EAS", and will have the exact same name of the file. So if you were splitting the EA's from a file called "moote_goof.zip", the EA's would be stored as ".\EAS\moote_goof.zip". You can check the syntax of eautil yourself in the online help. You can specify the name of the file which would store the extended attributes, but you probably don't have to go that far so I've left it out for simplicity. The command to join the attributes back together would be: EAUTIL filename /J , assumes that the extended attributes for the specified file are in the directory ".\EAS", and have the exact same name of the file, but again you can specify the name of the file which contains the extended attributes. Remember, if you suspect that it's the handling of the EA's which may be causing the problem then you'll have to split the EA's _before_ you do the copy. LE> I think it's been there for months. But I usually don't do both LE> things at once. But I had a friend over and while I was processing LE> new files I wanted to go over the old ones to see if there were any LE> he wanted. LE> LE> The server crashed doing much the same thing 6-8 months back (again LE> while he was visiting), and then did this all those times now, LE> because I was trying to get the files organized to ship over to his LE> system. Hm. Yeah, so this may not be something that's just popped up recently then. Yeah, I'd check that memory first, if you can, just for the sake of eliminating it as a problem. I would think that if it were really the EA's that were the real problem that this error would happen just about every time you did the copying. The extended attributes may just be a symptom of the problem, or just one extra thing that pushes the machine just that extra little bit over the edge to make it crash. On the other hand, maybe it's your friend. [:) Some people just exude this "anti-technology" aura around them. Remember "Jurassic Park" when Sam Niel came close to that monitor and it lost it's synch? Well there are really people like that out there! [:) If you do find out what the problem is, make sure you post it here. Netware seems to be very sensitive to memory problems and shortages and such so anything that you can contribute would certainly be helpful, I'm sure. Good luck and TTYL. --- þþ "Now, if we had a wheelbarrow, that would be something." --- AdeptXBBS v1.11y (FREEWare/2) * Origin: Moote Pointe (1:244/140) .