Dell Unity: Storage Processor Has Encountered Panic with Cause SIGSEGV
Summary: The Storage Processor (SP) experienced an unexpected panic and reboot due to a SIGSEGV (Segmentation Fault). This condition indicates that a process attempted to access memory that was unavailable or invalid, causing the operating system to terminate the process and trigger the SP panic. ...
Symptoms
A Storage Processor (SP) panic occurred on Unity OE 4.5.1.0.5.001, resulting in an unexpected reboot of SPX. Analysis of the diagnostic data shows that the panic was triggered by a SIGSEGV (Segmentation Fault).
At the time of the event, vulnerability scans were being performed against the Unity NAS environment. The scans included SSH-based probing of one or more NAS servers, which triggered the software defect and caused the affected SP to panic. Customers may observe an unexpected SP reboot, event log entries indicating a SIGSEGV panic, and temporary disruption to NAS services during the failover and recovery process.
Cause
The Storage Processor panic was caused by a software defect in the SSH service. Under specific conditions, an SSH client could send a sequence of protocol messages in an unexpected order. When processing this out-of-sequence request, the SSH service attempted to reference an internal memory location that had not been properly initialized.
As a result, the process accessed a null or invalid memory address, triggering a SIGSEGV (Segmentation Fault). The operating system terminated the affected process, which subsequently led to the Storage Processor panic and unexpected reboot. In this case, the condition was triggered during vulnerability scanning activities that included SSH-based probing of the Unity NAS servers.
Resolution