I have a small home server. This server runs on Gentoo Linux 2004 with kernel 2.6.9-r6. On this server I use Samba, ProFTPD, MySQL, Apache, PHP etc. Also, there’s VMWare Workstation 4.5.2 installed.
Here’s the problem: In VMWare I’ve got a Windows 2000 pro machine running. Whenever my IDE CDROM (old Aopen 32x) is attached to the system, the VM crashes after a few days because the / filesystem (hda5) has no free space left. Turning my computer off and on again fixes this problem (I can’t do a reboot, because my harddrive isn’t recognized anymore). After the reboot hda5 has regained all the free space it should have and it all works fine for a while. Also, I see all kinds of errors on /dev/hdb (that’s the primary slave, the cdrom is on that channel) in the kernel logs.
When the CDROM is detached from the system, everything works just fine like it should: no leaks, no crashes or whatsoever.
One’d think that this CDROM is just faulty, but I find it hard to believe, because it always worked fine on this system. I pulled it out and tried it on two other systems (Win XP and Ubuntu Linux) and I can’t find a single problem, it just works alright.
I tried all the logical things: exchange IDE cables, alternating IDE configuration etc etc but that all doesn’t yield me anything.
Does perhaps anybody have an idea what’s going on here? It’s not that big of an issue as I hardly/never use the CDROM on my server, but I’m really curious what this issue could be.