Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:02:54 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG, mckusick@mckusick.com Subject: Re: Any outstanding soft-updates or FFS bugs (matching this description)? Message-ID: <200011140302.eAE32sV43340@earth.backplane.com> References: <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.
I've had filesystems blow up under test when filling a parition
with softupdates turned on. The most recent time was last
weekend while I was testing low-memory stuff.
The problem, as always, is that at the time I just didn't have
the time to try to dd/gzip the partition, so I let fsck blow
it all away. I wound up with garbage in a number of files
that had not been actively written to during the test.
I'm not sure what it is. I swear, next time it happens I
will gzip the whole partition to try to get something to
Kirk that he can investigate.
-Matt
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