From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Nov 13 19: 4:10 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (placeholder-dcat-1076843399.broadbandoffice.net [64.47.83.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6506937B479 for ; Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:04:08 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.1/8.9.3) id eAE32sV43340; Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:02:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:02:54 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200011140302.eAE32sV43340@earth.backplane.com> To: Garrett Wollman Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG, mckusick@mckusick.com Subject: Re: Any outstanding soft-updates or FFS bugs (matching this description)? References: <200011131924.OAA53671@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message