Okay. Let me clarify a few things first. My favorite BitTorrent client is BTQueue for sure. I have never wanted to run other BitTorrent client especially on hosts placed in data center. BTQueue is the best candidate to run on server-class machine for remotely controlling through the Internet. Anyway, my friend didn’t think so. He had a machine running Windows 2003 because he like to use mouse to control everything instead of just a keyboard like me. This machine has been placed at a data center to run Azureus for him and then transferred files back to his home via FTP. Everything worked fine except only the bad sectors. Sometimes, the machine hung up without any notification. Then he checked all drives to ensure their healthy. In contrast, this machine has 3 drives, a IDE and two SATA. As a result, he found bad sectors in all drives, the most of them were existed in the IDE drive which is the system drive. This situation should not happen because all data are set to store in the two SATA. However, he claimed them all. Unfortunately, he had to claim some of them or all of them every 2 months.

Eventually, last month I suggested him to install Linux instead. It should be better in any cases. Centos could not be installed properly so he installed Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy instead. I helped him to setup several things such as Java, VNC, lm-sensors, and pure-ftpd. Both BTQueue and Azureus worked great until yesterday. I got following entries in /var/log/messages.

Feb 21 11:55:33 localhost kernel: [4298649.042000] hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Feb 21 11:56:30 localhost kernel: [4298649.042000] hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=48280639, high=2, low=14726207, sector=48280551
Feb 21 11:56:34 localhost kernel: [4298649.042000] ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Feb 21 11:56:34 localhost kernel: [4298649.042000] end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 48280551

Sadly, this error seems to indicate that hda has some kind of bad sectors. How can it happen? This was my first question in my mind when I saw these lines. Probably Azureus stores piece of data in /tmp or Java swaps in-memory data to /tmp automatically. By the way, it is time to claim this IDE again. Hopefully this is the last time since he will not use Azureus on this machine anymore.

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