Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 31 Mar 1999 04:04:24 -0500 (EST) | From | Alexander Viro <> | Subject | Re: softupdates and ext2 |
| |
On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Thomas Pornin wrote:
> Here is my problem: we have here several Linux PC in hostile environment > (students) and they are often uncleanly rebooted. The Sun Solaris > stations nearly always recover automatically, but the Linux stations > often require a manual root intervention. This upsets our sysadmin. Gah. Don't rely on Solaris that much - it's *not* a s-u and it is pretty able to corrupt fs silently. Example: sometime ago we had a power outage. I did rsh <host> last -10 reboot for our boxen. To my amazement two of them seemed to be unaffected, though they sit on the same circuit as affected ones. WTF? Then I noticed the *dates* given by last on those boxen. No way in hell could they stay up since the last summer (damn, their kernels are newer then that!) OK, I telnetted there and said last -10. Yeah, right. <foo> still logged in. Since Jun 1st. 1998. Lots of swearing followed. After going through the thing with truss and looking through the /var/adm/wtmpx it turned out that (a) on a dirty reboot /var/adm/wtmpx got truncated to the block boundary; (b) pututxline(3) happily kept adding new records to the end of file; (c) last didn't like misaligned records (surprise, surprise); (d) neither init(8) nor rc scripts cared to check the size of the thing; (e) size of record is *not* a power of 2 (it's 372), so further dirty reboots (there were ones) didn't restore the alignment. Overall: after the dirty reboot last(1) has a chance to stop working. Forever (OK, until you truncate the file by hands).
> So.. is there any plan/patch for integrating some softupdate feature to > ext2 under Linux ? Or is there something I utterly missed ?
Yes, there is. It's 2.3 stuff, *NOT* a 2.2 one.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |