freebsd stable - Sep 2003 - Weird DISKS behaviour on 4.8-STABLE

Hello people,

I have been experiencing a weird problem with 4.8-STABLE for a long time.
I was ignoring it, thinking that it was a problem with the SCSI disks or
perhaps the contoller. I changed the disks from the original Intel box
to a Compaq box and I still noticed the problem was there.

What happened is that all of a sudden, the disk would 'fill' up with
nothing! Yes, that's true. I would try to track down whatever it is
but end up with nothing. So I decide to reboot. What would then
happen is that during the reboot, the behaviour would be that akin
to that which you always see when the system was abnormally shutdown -
salvage of blocks, etc. Then as sure as day follows night, the space
is back to normal.

At some point I retired two disks, replacing them with two new ones.
Now on the same Compaq box, I am still experiencing the same symptoms.
For starters, `mount` does not report the correct disk sizes:

da0 is 17GB
da1 is 36GB


but `df -h` gives following output

Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    16G   4.5G  10.0G    31%    /
/dev/da1s1e    34G    17G    13G    56%    /wananchi


The output of `mount` is:

wash@ns2 ('tty') ~ 129 -> mount
/dev/da0s1a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/da1s1e on /wananchi (ufs, local, soft-updates)


I am beginning to think that disk space is being freed, but the blocks
are not being reallocated/reassigned, leading to the misbehaviour. I
don't know what the correct terminology would be ;)

I am not an expert with disks though, so I would appreciate any
insight into what the cause of such a problem could be.



-Wash

-- 
Odhiambo Washington   <wash@wananchi.com>  "The box said
'Requires
Wananchi Online Ltd.  www.wananchi.com      Windows 95, NT, or better,'
Tel: +254 2 313985-9  +254 2 313922         so I installed FreeBSD."   
GSM: +254 72 743223   +254 733 744121       This sig is McQ!  :-)

Bore, n.:
	A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

>>>>> "OW" == ODHIAMBO Washington
<wash@wananchi.com> writes:
OW> What happened is that all of a sudden, the disk would 'fill' up
with
OW> nothing! Yes, that's true. I would try to track down whatever it is
OW> but end up with nothing. So I decide to reboot. What would then

If you shut down to single user mode, where all of your processes are
killed, does the space magically reappear (possibly after a few
minutes)?

If so, then some program has a reference to a file that has been
deleted on disk, but is still writing to it.  My guess is that you
rotate some log file but do not tell the process writing to it to
reopen the file.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Vivek Khera,
Ph.D.                Khera Communications, Inc.
Internet: khera@kciLink.com       Rockville, MD       +1-240-453-8497
AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera   http://www.khera.org/~vivek/