xfs
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: file corruption

To: Dmitry Nikiforov <dniq_kraft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: file corruption
From: Chris Wedgwood <cw@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 17:16:18 -0800
Cc: linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <406CB95B.4040500@dniq-online.com>
References: <406AF7B6.6030405@dniq-online.com> <20040402001801.GA24900@dingdong.cryptoapps.com> <406CB95B.4040500@dniq-online.com>
Sender: linux-xfs-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 06:52:43PM -0600, Dmitry Nikiforov wrote:

> 'Corrupted' as in 'incorrect data in them'. Besides, a few files
> were lost (Mozilla bookmarks.html, for example, is one of them).

Incorrect data can/will happen for some files.  XFS journals metadata
not data so this is expected unless applications take sufficient care
(MTAs like postfix a good example of applications which do the right
thing).

But _what_ incorrect data are we talking about?

> Well, it looks like a random garbage. Last time it happened to
> /var/log/messages - there was some random binary data at the end of
> it.

That shouldn't happen (nulls might though).  Can you reproduce this?

> At the same time, there were no error messages nor warnings when the
> system was being started and fsck was running, which I find very
> odd...

I don't see why there should be....  journal replay and fsck have no
way of knowing what files should look like.  They don't look at file
contents.

> Open files, as far as I can tell right now.

Such as?  You mentioned log files, what else?

> Some files I find just later that they were corrupted, so I can't
> tell what was happening to them at that very moment :(

It would be good to know what these files are and when they were last
used relative to the crash.

> While I don't have too many crashes (about 4-5 in total so far) - it
> always involves something missing.

What causes these crashes?

> On my office machine (which is 100% linux box with XFS all over it
> :) ) every time it gets unconditionally rebooted, I loose most of my
> KDE settings and most of Mozilla settings (these are that I can
> notice immediately after the reboot).

I've seen this (I use KDE here).  As best as I can tell it's KDE and
Mozilla making dumb assumptions.  I'm not sure I blame them but they
aren't exactly careful about their configuration files either which
bugs me a little.  There might going on here than is apparent so it's
possible there is a filesystem bug, but I've not been able to
reproduce something I can blame XFS when it comes to KDE configuration
files.

I'll try again later.

> And, like I said, there were a couple of times when there was some
> random garbage in /var/log/messages, for example:

[...]

> Mar 31 22:01:00 dniq CROND[24797]: (root) CMDL$|.?..?.??.

[... non-NULL cruft deleted ...]

Is that common and/or reproducible?  That doesn't seem right.



  --cw


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>