[Discuss] Firewire 800 controller and sbp2

[pw]

taras wrote:
>
/chop
>I ran into the problems that you described
> with just one drive. Basically after a while of io activity the fw 
> system screws itself up and firewire no longer works.
> Same setup works fine if a recent 2.4 kernel is used.
/chop
> 
> Taras

How much activity were you getting before your firewire bombed?
How long did your system go before the poo hit the turbine?

The reason I ask is, these drives have been pretty reliable for
the past 3 years. They ran fine with mandriva 2006 for a full year
with a 2.6 kernel.

Problems seem to arise with firewire when things like powerdowns
happen without modprobe -r sbp2 first. For some reason when
drives are on system as partition devices, even if the drives
are not mounted, if the system powers down the file system
on the drive gets broken. Then running fsck after reboot does
the rest of the job.

With proper shutdown script and UPS daemon that's not a real
problem for power fails etc..

The current problems came to the fore after a power failure,
a UPS, and a bad battery combined to shutdown the computer
before shutdown scripts got to run.

The biggest problem with firewire 800 is the flimsy cable connection.
Some committee, somewhere, really missed when they agreed to that
design.