[CentOS] CentOS 6.2 + areca raid + xfs problems

Tue Apr 3 20:58:34 UTC 2012
Tony Schreiner <anthony.schreiner at bc.edu>

Two weeks ago I (clean-)installed CentOS 6.2 on a server which had been running 5.7.

There is a 16 disk = ~11 TB data volume running on an Areca ARC-1280 raid card with LVM + xfs filesystem on it. The included arcmsr driver module is loaded.

At first it seemed ok, but with in a few hours I started getting I/O error message on directory listings, and then a bit later when I did a vgdisplay command there was garbage in that.

I then ran the volume check on the RAID card bios, it flagged 3 errors. When I restarted the system, things were ok, but then the problem reappeared.
I ran another volume check and no errors were flagged (I should note, the check takes about 9 hours). but upon restarting, the file system was ok, but then went bad again.

Another symptom was that the cli64 raid management utility, which I got from the Areca site would just hang.

After a couple of days of this, I decided I could not afford to have this system unavailable, and I reinstalled CentOS 5.8. Everything has been fine since.

Any body else seen anything like this?

Tony Schreiner
Boston College