Hi all. I was moving filesystems around this morning and I had an odd
occurance. Let me take you through step by step. Essentially what I'm
doing here is to take an xfsdump of /var/spool/news and move it back on to
/var. I had plans to run the box as a news servers but this won't be a
big part of its future. I aborted when I ran into a problem or I would
have taken a dump of /var & /opt and repartitioned quite a bit.
1. Reboot server
2. Boot into custom 2.4.29 (single user mode)
Until moments before the box has been running a custom 2.4.26 for months
without any issues. Actual uptime on this box was only a couple of weeks
(this is my personal fileserver at home, no UPS).
The configs for 2.4.26 & 2.4.29 are identical except where 2.4.29 added
new config items. I answered N for each of these during make oldconfig.
3. Take an xfsdump of /var/spool/news (/dev/hdb11)
cd /var
/sbin/xfsdump -0 -f var.spool.news /dev/hdb11
I made session label and label both news.
4. Go to mv /var/spool/news to the side
Silly of course but I guess I was tired. Of course I get a "device or
resoruce busy" as /var/spool/news is a mounted filesystem.
I mention this as it is the only error that happened in the process and
maybe it is important.
5. umount /var/spool/news
6. cd to /var/spool/news
xfsrestore -rf /var/var.spool.news .
7. Check the data is there
Yes, the directory /var/spool/news looks good.
8. Remove the /var/spool/news entry from /etc/fstab
9. Mount /dev/hdb11 (old /vsr/spool/news) as /mnt
mount /dev/hdb11 /mnt
I just wanted to have a look at it. Glad I did.
Here it is right now:
/dev/hdb11 9.8G 320k 9.7G 1% /mnt
It's empty. It wasn't empty before. The data got dumped properly and
restored properly:
zen:~#du -sh /var/spool/news
576k /var/spool/news
But the filesystem formerly known as /var/spool/news was empty.
I did not do a mkfs and just to be sure I reviewed my command history.
Nope, no mkfs.
10. I rebooted into the custom 2.4.26 (single user mode)
I attempted to mount /dev/hdb11 again. Still empty.
11. Reconfigured system to default boot the custom 2.4.26 and came up
into multi-user mode.
I've taken a dd of hdb11 for reference purposes. As a result of this
little disappearance I'm going to stay away from 2.4.29 until I hear that
something else may have caused the problem.
I'm happy to conduct any tests on the dd copy of hdb11 (mounted loop back)
or even on the real filesystem although I am going to proceed with the
repartitioning soon.
Rob
--
Robert Brockway B.Sc.
Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions Ltd.
Phone: 416-669-3073 Email: rbrockway@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.opentrend.net
OpenTrend Solutions: Reliable, secure solutions to real world problems.
Contributing Member of Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org)
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