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Date:      Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:24:09 -0800 (PST)
From:      John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
To:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Strange transient filesystem failures
Message-ID:  <XFMail.991218122409.jdp@polstra.com>

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I have been seeing some baffling errors on freefall, and I'd like to
know if anybody has a clue about what could be causing them.  There
is a CVSup server running on freefall, and it constantly mirrors the
entire repository over to cvsup-master.freebsd.org.  A new update is
run every 6 minutes, or as fast as it can go when it takes longer than
that.

Occasionally, I am seeing updates fail because opendir() failed with
ENOENT on the server (freefall).  For example:

Cannot read directory "/usr/local/etc/cvsup/prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs/src/sys/nwfs": No such file or directory

But from looking at the timestamps of the directory and its parent
directory, it's clear that that directory _did_ exist and was not
being modified at that time.  Also, the commit logs don't show any
commits going on around that time.  Nothing unusual appears in the
system logs, either.

These failures are transient and short-lived; the next update
always works fine.  The failures also seem to be clustered.  In one
case there happened to be three updates running at once (two from
committers), and all three failed within a 5-second interval on
different directories:

    /usr/local/etc/cvsup/prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs/ports/x11-toolkits/v
    /usr/local/etc/cvsup/prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs/src/sys/nwfs
    /usr/local/etc/cvsup/prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs/ports/sysutils/afio/pkg

At first I suspected that the file table was full, as there are two
messages in the dmesg output to that effect.  But now I don't think
that's it.  I have seen several of these failures and have immediately
checked the dmesg output, but no new "file: table was full" messages
have appeared.

Soft-updates are not in use.

FWIW, the paths in question involve a few symlinks:

    /usr/local -> /d/usr.local
    /d/usr.local/etc/cvsup/prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs -> /home/ncvs
    /home/ncvs -> /x/ncvs

The system is running -stable from October 30.

John
--
  John Polstra                                               jdp@polstra.com
  John D. Polstra & Co., Inc.                        Seattle, Washington USA
  "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."        -- Nora Ephron


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