XFS filesystem corruption

[Julien FERRERO]

Hi Emmanuel

2013/3/6 Emmanuel Florac <eflorac at intellique.com>:
> Le Wed, 6 Mar 2013 16:08:59 +0100 vous écriviez:
>
>> I am totally stuck and I really don't know how to duplicate the
>> corruption. I only know that units are used to be power cycle by
>> operator while the fs is still mounted (no proper shutdown / reboot).
>> My guess is the fs journal shall handle this case and avoid such
>> corruption.
>
> Wrong guess. It may work or not, depending upon a long list of
> parameters, but basically not turning it off properly is asking for
> problems and corruptions. The problem will be tragically aggravated if
> your hardware RAID doesn't have a battery backed-up cache.
>

OK but our server is 95% of the time reading data and 5% of the time
writing data. We have a case of a server that did not write anything
at the time of failure (and during all the uptime session). Moreover,
failure occurs to files that were opened in read-only or weren't
accessed at all at the time of failure. I don't think the H/W RAID is
the issue since we have the same corruption with other setup without
H/W RAID.

Does the "ls" output with "???" looks like a fs corruption ?