Suspiciously broken filesystem

Nigel Metheringham
Wed, 06 Jun 2001 10:37:49 -0000

I appear to have a broken filesystem on this box to the point where I am
probably going to rebuild the system since I have lost trust in it.... I
was wondering if there was any reasonable postmortum work I could do on
it before it gets rebuilt.

History is that the laptop has a much mauled partition set on it -
initially it came with 100% win2k, I then shrunk that and added linux (a
RH71 install onto 2 partitions - /boot and /), then decided to get rid
of the win2k, and did a set of operations with parted 1.4.14 (running
from a boot floppy) to move and grow the root partition (which was ext2
through these operations).

I then installed the ext3 version from sourceforge onto a 2.4.5-ac[78]
kernel.

Immediately after boot, a perl process failed to write a file:-
  my $fh = FileHandle->new('>/etc/resolv.conf') || die $!;

gave the following error
  Value too large for defined data type

After that the target file was a zero length file with normal
permissions.  I removed it and the process ran OK.

A few other oddities were seen - files not accessible from gnuclient
when they should be - ie ls >/tmp/x  gnuclient /tmp/x did not give you
what was expected... but it all settled down and seemed to be working...

Then TSM (backup program) started bombing out (had done some successful
backups).  The error message was
  ANS1028S Internal program error.  Please see your service
  representative.
which helps little :-)

I decided to force a fsck, so did touch /forcefsck and rebooted

The fsck threw up many thousands of errors, all of the form
  INODE nnnn i_blocks is 32, should be 16

with the i_blocks & should-be values various multiples of 8.

I suspect that parted has screwed up, and so ext3 has been running on a
losing wicket ever since... however even after the fsck (which obviously
won't be able to fix everything if parted has broken things), I am still
seeing the previous symptoms with TSM and perl

    Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
[ ----- Security is not an add-on -- security is a way of life ----- ]