XFS File system in trouble

[Brian Foster]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 08:02:50PM -0500, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
> 
> 	I found the problem with md5sum (and probably nfs, as well).  One of the
> memory modules in the server was bad.  The problem with XFS persists.  Every
> time tar tried to create the directory:
> 
> /RAID/Server-Main/Equipment/Drive Controllers/HighPoint Adapters/Rocket 2722/Driver/RR276x/Driver/Linux/openSUSE/rr276x-suse-11.2-i386/linux/suse/i386-11.1
> 
> 	It would begin spitting out errors, starting with "Cannot mkdir: Structure
> needs cleaning".  At that point, XFS had shut down.  I went into
> /RAID/Server-Main/Equipment/Drive Controllers/HighPoint Adapters/Rocket
> 2722/Driver/RR276x/Driver/Linux/openSUSE/rr276x-suse-11.2-i386/linux/suse/
> and created the i386-11.1 directory by hand, and tar no longer starts
> spitting out errors at that point, but it does start up again at
> RR2782/Windows/Vista-Win2008-Win7-legacy_single/x64.
> 

So is this untar problem a reliable reproducer? If so, here's what I
would try to hopefully isolate a filesystem problem from something
underneath:

xfs_metadump -go /dev/md0 /somewhere/on/rootfs/md0.metadump
xfs_mdrestore -g /somewhere/on/rootfs/md0.metadump /.../fileonrootfs.img
mount /.../fileonrootfs.img /mnt/

... and repeat the test on that mount using the original tarball (if
it's on the associated fs, the version from the dump will have no data).
This will create a metadata only dump of the original fs onto another
storage device (e.g., whatever holds the root fs), restore the metadump
to a file and mount it loopback. The resulting fs will not contain any
file data, but will contain all of the metadata such as directory
structure, etc. and is otherwise mountable and usable for experimental
purposes.

If the problem is in the filesystem or "above" (as in kernel, memory
issue, etc.), the test should fail on this mount. If the problem is
beneath the fs such as somewhere in the storage stack (assuming the
rootfs storage stack is reliable), it probably shouldn't fail.

Brian

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