Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 14:24:57 -0500 (EST) From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> To: stable@freebsd.org Cc: mckusick@mckusick.com Subject: Any outstanding soft-updates or FFS bugs (matching this description)? Message-ID: <200011131924.OAA53671@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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This past weekend, our main mail server got mail-bombed.[1] We ended up with a /var/spool/mqueue with over 50,000 files in it. /var and /var/spool are on separate partitions, and both filesystems were running with soft updates enabled. The log files in /var were being extended rapidly, as was the /var/spool/mqueue directory. Somehow during all this the root directory and inodes of /var got completely toasted, beyond the ability of fsck to clean them up. (fsck eventually errored out, complaining of a preposterously large inode number.) The machine did not panic, and was grinding along happily without a /var until I rebooted it to force a fsck. During recovery procedures, I turned soft updates off on both filesystems, and things seem to be running smoothly now. I also deleted the spam and reconfigured sendmail to block further submissions, so that probably hasn't proven anything. The entire contents of /var were lost (even before I newfs'ed the partition), and the gigantic /var/spool/mqueue has now been compacted, so I can't say precisely how large it was (other than ``probably on its first indirect block''). This machine is running: FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE #4: Thu Sep 7 21:14:09 EDT 2000 I recall that there was a soft updates bug related to filling up the disk, but in scanning through the logs it certainly appears that this was fixed (and would have led to a panic anyway). -GAWollman [1] Actually, it was relay-raped to mail-bomb another machine on our network. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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