On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 02:37:06PM +0100, Simon Vogl wrote:Right, I thought so, too. On the other side, the partition is mounted with the 'on error remount readonly'
sorry about this - yes, they are I/O errors (interestingly, I do use LANG=C normally.
don't know what reset this - som kind of Debian magic, I suppose).
I/O errors are returned my the filesystem under a number of different conditions; in this case, it's likely they were simply caused by filesystem inconsistencies. How the filesystem became inconsistent is a different storiy.
The log files did not show anything, I didn't even have something on the system console :(
In general, if userspace sees an "I/O Error" returned up to it, the kernel would have logged something; either a hardware I/O error, or a filesystem inconsistency warning. If you didn't see something, then either the relevant log files got corrupted and so were lost, or you aren't looking at the right logs, and/or the console has been configured to suppress certain (fairly important) levels of log messages. Basically, there really should have been *some* kind of log entries given the symptoms you described.
The usual cause for this kind of really massive levels of inconsistency is a hardware fault; either garbage is being written into the inode table, or the block sector address to the controller is getting corrupted, so the wrong data is being written to the wrong place, or memory is getting corrupted and then being written out to disk.
It's possible that this might be caused by a filesystem bug, of course, but I'm not aware of any other reports that match your report at this point, and ext3 is fairly widely used.
So my first suggest is to make sure that logging is working correctly, since the fact that you didn't see any logs, especially on the console, is highly suspect. The linux kernel is pretty verbose when it's unhappy, and from what you described, the kernel should have been extremely upset. :-)
option, which could be why I did not find anything... Nevertheless, I have the disk image that I will look
at as soon as I got the machine restored (and I have another one that I can try to kill, maybe I can
reproduce it >:)
I know almost certain, btw, that it is a software problem - my workstation had the same problem some
weeks ago, but I did not think much about it - I simply did an fsck and cloned it from the master machine
once more. Since then, it ran without errors.
btw, anyone know how I get rid of those pesky files that stay around with broken bits in them? I cant
even remove those inodes as root - I moved the directories containing them to isolation...
Thanks for the help, Simon
-- _______________________________________________________________________ Dr. Simon Vogl Institut für Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz Altenberger Straße 69, A-4040 Linz, Austria
Tel: +43 732 2468-8517, Fax: +43 732 2468-8426 mailto: vogl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.soft.uni-linz.ac.at/
_______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
