On 13 Jun 2003 at 9:11am, Eric Sproul wrote

> I have recently seen a couple occurrences of a "data timeout" on a
> particular DLE that I cannot figure out.  The host is running RH7.2,
> serving GNU MailMan lists.  It has 512MB of RAM and 2 20G IDE disks
> running software-RAID1.  
> 
> The device giving me trouble is /dev/md6, an ext2 fs which contains
> mailing list archives.  Its total size is 6.2GB with about 3.8GB used. 
> This fs doesn't change much, only the occasional twiddle when a mailing
> list post comes in and the archive is updated.  We don't have all that
> many lists, and most of them have little volume.  So I don't suspect an
> actively changing filesystem to be the culprit.

Is the host fully updated (especially glibc and the kernel)?  Dump on 2.4 
series kernels has always been a contentious issue.  After moving to 2.4 
and seeing lots of timeouts, I converted all my dumptypes to using tar.  
No problems.

If you want to keep using dump, update everything with the latest errata, 
and grab the latest version of dump from <http://dump.sourceforge.net/>.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University