[zfs-discuss] Possible ZFS problem

andy thomas
Sat, 13 Aug 2011 18:19:25 -0000

On Sat, 13 Aug 2011, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Aug 2011, andy thomas wrote:
>> However, one of our users recently put a 35 Gb tar.gz file on this
server
>> and uncompressed it to a 215 Gb tar file. But when he tried to untar
it,
>> after about 43 Gb had been extracted we noticed the disk usage reported
by
>> df for that ZFS pool wasn''t changing much. Using du -sm on the
extracted
>> archive directory showed that the size would increase over a period of
30
>> seconds or so and then suddenly drop back about 50 Mb and start
increasing
>> again. In other words it seems to be going into some sort of a loop and
all
>> we could do was to kill tar and try again when exactly the same thing
>> happened after 43 Gb had been extracted.
>
> What ''tar'' program were you using?  Make sure to also try
using the
> Solaris-provided tar rather than something like GNU tar.

Using the default Solaris tar fixed the problem!

I''ve tended to use GNU tar on Solaris as apparently there was a bug in
the
Solaris version of tar from very log ago where it would not extract files
properly from tarfiles created on non-Solaris systems. Maybe this
long-standing bug has been fixed at last?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Andy