Re: Mysterious server crashes

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:37:54PM +0200, Žiga Kranjec wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Recently we have upgraded our debian system (sid),
> which has since started crashing mysteriously.
> We are still looking into that. It runs on 3ware RAID.
> Postgres package is 8.4.8-2.
>
> The database came back up apparently ok, except
> for indexes. Running reindex produces this error on
> one of the tables:
>
> ERROR: unexpected chunk number 1 (expected 0) for toast value
> 17539760 in pg_toast_16992
>
> Same with select.
>
> I tried running reindex on toast table didn't help. Running:
>
> select * from pg_toast.pg_toast_16992 where chunk_id = 17539760;
>
> crashed postgres backend (and apparently the whole server).
>
> Is there anything we can/should do to fix the problem, besides
> restoring the whole database from backup?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ziga
>

Hi Ziga,

I do not want to be negative, but it sounds like your server is
having serious problems completely outside of PostgreSQL. Reading a
file should not cause your system to crash. That sounds like a
driver or hardware problem and you need to fix that. I would make
sure you have a good backup for your DB before you do anything
else.

Good luck,
Ken