RE: Oops message from cvs process

[Shankar Unni]

> After this, the server started spewing out lots of Oops
> messages after 7-8 days of operation. If I reboot the machine 
> the problem disappears for a while and starts again.

Understand that these are *KERNEL* oops messages. Unlike Windows 95 or
98, user processes can't screw up the kernel in this way (they can't
just reach over and trash the kernel's data), so this is clearly an
isolated kernel problem.

If you look at the ksymoops trace, you see that the code is in the fcntl
code. Not surprising that CVS tickled this (it *does* perform lots of
file operations, you know :-), but you should be talking to the kernel
gurus about this.

Do you have a RedHat support contract? (I thought not :-). If you do,
contact them. If you don't have one, try:

(a) upgrading to a more recent kernel. You can get the latest kernel for
the 7.1 distribution from the RedHat download site.  You *ARE* running
an ancient intermediate distribution, after all. Very few people use
7.1; they either use 7.2/7.3 or 6.2 (and the truly brave at heart use
8.0).

(b) if that doesn't help, post to one of the Linux newsgroups for help
(comp.os.linux.help ?).

OR

(c) Schedule a cron job for every sunday and wednesday to reboot your
machine :-/.

Good luck.
--
Shankar.