On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 01:42:11PM -0500, Sam Carleton wrote:
> I have convered an old machine that was a Windows server
> into a NetBSD mail server.  The machine has a 3ware 5000
> series RAID card in it.  This morning I came to ssh into

The 5000 series 3ware hardware is notoriously buggy.

> the machine and low and behold the machine has crashed
> because the mirrored drives got out of sync.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  How did the machine
crash?  What makes you believe that it crashed "because the
mirrored drives got out of sync"?  If I lose a component of
my 3ware RAID, it just reports the appropriate error and
rebuilds -- this isn't even really under driver control,
the card firmware just does it all by itself and tells
the driver about it later.

More importantly, why would you continue to use a hardware
mirroring card that let the mirror "get out of sync" with
any regularity?  That's an extremely serious bug and suggests
that all kinds of data mangling could happen.  If I had RAID
hardware that did that, I'd just use software RAID, honestly.

In general, when reporting bugs in NetBSD (actual or merely purported)
you should, at the very least, send along the panic message and, if
your kernel has DDB, the DDB traceback.  It is very very hard to
provide any kind of meaningful help when the problem is described only
as "low and behold the machine has crashed because the mirrored drives
got out of sync".

Thor