Corrupt inodes on shared disk...

Stephen Samuel
2007-04-03T19:40:10Z

I don't know much about RHCS, but I'm think that this is more likely
to be a Red Hat problem than an ext3 problem..

1) *IF* RHCS properly locks out the 'dead' system, and it doesn't
manage (at some time after the backup system takes over) to write
cashes to the shared drive,

2) and *IF* the failover software isn't too stupid to do things like
run the journal, and otherwise do sane FSCK things before mounting,
then you shouldn't have a problem.

My best guess is that 2) is relatively unlikely which leaves 1) as
probable cause.

If your primary system does *ANY* writes after the failover starts,
then you can probably expect problems like you've seen here. (does
RHCS _physically_ lock out the second system, or is it a software
lockout?)

The other question I have is: why is the system failing over?  Other
than testing, a well built HA system should almost *never* actually
need to fail over. (we're not talking Windows servers here :-} )  HA
should be like insurance ... You pay up front for it and work to make
sure that you never actually have to use what you've paid for.


On 4/3/07, Paul Fitzmaurice <pfitzmaurice at aveksa.com>
wrote:
> I am having problems when using a Dell PowerVault MD3000 with multipath
from
> a Dell PowerEdge 1950.  I have 2 cables connected and mount the partition
on
> the DAS Array.  I am using RHEL 4.4 with RHCS and a two node cluster.  Only
> one node is "Active" at a time, it creates a mount to the
partition, and if
> there is an issue RHCS will fence the device and then the other node will
> mount the partition.
>
> I have now run into a problem twice where my ext3 (with Journaling) has
> corrupt inodes.  This actually has resulted in a filesystem with #xxxxxxxxx
> files and directories.