== During your crisis, remember to look for anomalies This is a war story. Today I had one of those valuable learning experiences for a system administrator. What happened is that one of [[our old fileservers ../solaris/ZFSFileserverSetup]] locked up mysteriously, so we power cycled it. Then it locked up again. And again (and an attempt to get a crash dump failed). We thought it might be hardware related, so we transplanted the system disks into an entirely new chassis (with more memory, because there was some indications that it might be running out of memory somehow). It still locked up. Each lockup took maybe ten or fifteen minutes from the reboot, and things were all the more alarming and mysterious because this particular old fileserver only had a handful of production filesystems still on it; almost all of them had been migrated to one of [[our new fileservers ../solaris/ZFSFileserverSetupII]]. After one more lockup we gave up and went with our panic plan: we disabled NFS and set up to do an emergency migration of the remaining filesystems to the appropriate new fileserver. Only as we started the first filesystem migration did we notice that one of the ZFS pools was completely full (so full it could not make a ZFS snapshot). As we were freeing up some space in the pool, a little light came on in the back of my mind; I remembered reading something about how full ZFS pools on our ancient version of Solaris could be very bad news, and I was pretty sure that earlier I'd seen a bunch of NFS write IO at least being attempted against the pool. Rather than migrate the filesystem after the pool had some free space, we selectively re-enabled NFS fileservice. The fileserver stayed up. We enabled more NFS fileservice. And things stayed happy. At this point we're pretty sure that we found the actual cause of all of our fileserver problems today. (Afterwards [[I discovered https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/523232246757883904]] that we had run into something like this [[before https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/198443974506184705]].) What this has taught me is ~~during an inexplicable crisis, I should try to take a bit of time to look for anomalies~~. Not specific anomalies, but general ones; things about the state of the system that aren't right or don't seem right. (There is a certain amount of hindsight bias in this advice, but I want to mull that over a bit before I wrote more about it. The more I think about it the more complicated real crisis response becomes.)