----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Wilts" <ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Jeff Boyce" <jboyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "General Red Hat Linux discussion
list" <redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 10:22 AM
Subject: Re: Change in percent disk used after directory deletion and
recovery
On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 09:41:51AM -0800, Jeff Boyce wrote:
I am hoping someone may be able to educate me on how to diagnose what
happened to my system. I have a Dell PE2600, running RHES 3 completely
up2date, PERC 4/di, Raid5 with 3x36G drives, functioning primarily as a
Samba file server to 8 window desktops. I was notified yesterday morning
that it appeared that a directory under our primary Samba share was
missing. This directory contained our active projects files, approx. 11G
and 16,500 files. It was there one moment, then gone about a half hour
later; I am presuming an accidental deletion at this point. I looked
through some of the log files (samba logs, and others I don't recall) and
found no indication of what might have happened. So I restored the
directory and all its files from tape to a new directory with success.
The
logwatch summary of disk space for before the deletion event and after
the
restoration of the directory are shown below. The deleted directory was
under the /ecosystem share mount. The current disk usage puzzles me
because it appears that the increase in disk space used on /sda10 is
equal
to the size of the directory restored from tape.
Questions:
1. Is it possible that the directory was not deleted, but instead hidden
in some way?
I've seen this happen on one of my file servers (happens to be VMS but
that doens't matter). Users go ahead and rename directories by accident
all the time. It's way too easy to fat-finger this in a Windows GUI.
2. Where would I look to find evidence of what might have happened to
the
directory initially?
I'd update the slocate database and then do a couple of searches for
files that you know are there and see if they pop up in multiple spots.
3. Why is my disk usage significantly increased following restoration of
the directory?
Because the original files were never deleted.
4. How should I assign permissions to a primary directory to prevent
accidental deletion, yet still allow subdirectories under this directory
to
be created, deleted, and otherwise be used by all employees?
I don't think you can. On Linux, write implies delete. Not so on other
OSs.
Aren't you glad you had good backups?
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program
Ed -
Thanks for the insight and the lesson to use locate. As Paul Harvey would
say; now I know the rest of the story. A simple locate on a single file
found that the missing directory had been accidentally moved to an adjacent
subdirectory as a result of a bad mouse move in a Windows GUI. I wish I
would have thought of that yesterday while others were in a panic. I was
calm because I knew that it was only an inconvenience to restore from tape
and not a catastrophe. The results of the locate fits the description
provided to me from the person explaining what they thought they did. And
it explains the significant increase in disk usage. I am very glad that we
have a good tape backup system. Overall we only lost a hour and a half of
time and had to re-edit a couple of files.
[jeffb@Bison jeffb]$ locate StanESA.doc
/ecosystem/Projects/LEAPS/StanESA.doc
/ecosystem/Reference/Projects/LEAPS/StanESA.doc
Jeff Boyce
Meridian Environmental
www.meridianenv.com
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