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Date:      Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:02:29 -0500
From:      "Brian Gold" <bgold@simons-rock.edu>
To:        <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>
Subject:   odd phantom directory (cross posted from freebsd-general)
Message-ID:  <072001cdc41c$291283a0$7b378ae0$@simons-rock.edu>

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Hi all,

My problem appears to be resolved for now, but I would definitely like to
understand what the root cause of the issue was. I'm crossposting this to
freebsd-fs based on some a suggestion from a freebsd-general user.

--------------------------------------------
First post
--------------------------------------------
I ran into a rather odd issue this morning with my FreeBSD 9.0-Release
system running ZFS v28. This system serves as an RSYNC host which all of our
other systems back up to each night. Last night, I started getting the
following error: file has vanished: "/backup/ldap1/etc/pki"

Now, usually when I get a file has vanished error during an RSYNC run, it
indicates that the source file/directory on the system that is sending the
rsync backup has been deleted or moved before rsync got a chance to actually
send it. That doesn't appear to be the case here. "/backup/ldap1/etc/pki" is
the destination directory on my Freebsd/ZFS server. I take a look in
"/backup/ldap1/etc" on my Freebsd server and the "pki" subdirectory is no
longer listed.

Ok, so I run "mkdir /backup/ldap1/etc/pki" and get the following error:
"mkdir: /backup/ldap1/etc/pki: File exists". Odd

Just to double check, I run "ls -la /backup/ldap1/etc/pki" and get the
following: "ls: /backup/ldap1/etc/pki: No such file or directory"

Alright, how about a simple touch? "touch: /backup/ldap1/etc/pki: No such
file or directory"

Fine. Maybe there is something funky about the "/backup/ldap1/etc" directory
that is preventing me from doing any of this. "mkdir
/backup/ldap1/etc/pki2". That works just fine.

What the heck?

Looking at the output of my daily security run, I see the following:

Checking setuid files and devices:
find: /backup/ldap1/etc/fonts/conf.avail: No such file or directory
find: /backup/ldap1/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf: No such file or
directory
find: /backup/ldap1/etc/pki: No such file or directory

So, it looks like there are a few files/directories in /backup/ldap1/etc
that were affected.
Looking through dmesg and /var/log/messages, I don't see anything out of the
ordinary. 
I'm running a zpool scrub now just to be on the safe side, but I haven't
seen any checksum or other errors so far.

Any thoughts as to what might be causing this?

--------------------------------------------
second post
--------------------------------------------
It looks like this may be the same issue as reported here:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2011-October/027902.html
but that thread seems to have just died off about a year ago.
Zfs scrub is still running, but not reported errors so far. I'm going to run
a "zdb -ccv backup" once that is done.

>From looking over this other thread, I tried just a simple "ls
/backup/ldap1/etc" and "/backup/ldap1/etc/pki" does show up if I do "ls"
without any arguments. If I do an "ls -l" then it doesn't show up.

--------------------------------------------
third post
--------------------------------------------
Ok, really confused now. I just ran an "rm -rf /backup/ldap1", which errored
out when trying to rm "/backup/ldap1/etc/pki",
"/backup/ldap1/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf", and
"/backup/ldap1/etc/fonts/conf.avail". Everything else got purged correctly,
except for those phantom files.

I then reran my rsync script, which DIDN'T error this time, shipped all the
files over, and I can now read those phantom files/folders just fine.




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