Hi--
We've been observing some consistent filesystem corruption under ext3.
The problem is that a directory created by one of our applications
vanishes for some reason. The directory is created on installation the
application. The files it contains are written infrequently (days to
months) and read as part of every user command. The directory is under
/etc and always has the same path.
So far, we have had three separate customers with this problem and we
have observed it once ourselves. One of our customers was able to use the
ext2 filesystem editor and reattach the orphaned inode, recovering his
data. When we observed it here, fsck -f (ext2 and ext3) didn't find
anything wrong with the filesystem. We are running Debian woody (stable)
with a 2.4.18 kernel.
We haven't had reports of other files vanishing, just this one directory
and only under ext3.
Andy
--
-----------------------
Andy Vaught
TOLIS Engineering
andy@tolisgroup.com
Hi--
We've been observing some consistent filesystem corruption under ext3.
The problem is that a directory created by one of our applications
vanishes for some reason. The directory is created on installation the
application. The files it contains are written infrequently (days to
months) and read as part of every user command. The directory is under
/etc and always has the same path.
So far, we have had three separate customers with this problem and we
have observed it once ourselves. One of our customers was able to use the
ext2 filesystem editor and reattach the orphaned inode, recovering his
data. When we observed it here, fsck -f (ext2 and ext3) didn't find
anything wrong with the filesystem. We are running Debian woody (stable)
with a 2.4.18 kernel.
We haven't had reports of other files vanishing, just this one directory
and only under ext3.
Andy
--
-----------------------
Andy Vaught
TOLIS Engineering
andy@tolisgroup.com
Hi, On Mon, 2003-03-03 at 23:50, Andy Vaught wrote:> We've been observing some consistent filesystem corruption under ext3. > The problem is that a directory created by one of our applications > vanishes for some reason. The directory is created on installation the > application. The files it contains are written infrequently (days to > months) and read as part of every user command. The directory is under > /etc and always has the same path. > > So far, we have had three separate customers with this problem and we > have observed it once ourselves. One of our customers was able to use the > ext2 filesystem editor and reattach the orphaned inode, recovering his > data. When we observed it here, fsck -f (ext2 and ext3) didn't find > anything wrong with the filesystem. We are running Debian woody (stable) > with a 2.4.18 kernel. > > We haven't had reports of other files vanishing, just this one directory > and only under ext3.This sounds really odd. I can't imagine any form of filesystem corruption which could result in a directory full of data vanishing but e2fsck still being happy. Only an explicit user-land unlink ought to be able to do that. I've only seen this sort of thing reported once or twice in the past, but it has always ended up being traced to something happening in user space. Can you reproduce this with a current 2.4.21-pre kernel from Marcelo, by the way? --Stephen