strange output of "ls l" 3659

Floyd L. Davidson

buttuming you have lots of memory or lots of time, couldn't fsck walk the inodes and check against the freelist before allocating a block? Or, if you only need a block or two, do it in ram until you can confirm that the block(s) in the freelist really are free?

It used to be that fsck could be pointed at a "scratch" device where it could write whatever it couldn't hold in ram. I haven't seen mention of that in recent fsck man pages either - but that's another place you could store things until you knew the freelist was safe.

But that raises another question - vm is certainly working, so fsck has at least a good part of swap for whatever it needs to scribble out.

This particularly bugs me because an occbuttional customer called just as I was leaving for the weekend with a tale of a crashed system. He's not under any support agreement, so I wasn't about to give up my weekend to help him, and therefor I pbutted it over to someone else I know. That person later called me saying that fsck had run out of space in lost+found - this was a SCO system, but only a few releases old, say circa 1995 or so, so it surprised me - but then again I don't know how bad the damage was. All SCO hating folks can take a sip of their beer and tip their hats here, of course..

OT - a later phone conversation revealed that this company had been backing up TO THE SAME TAPE forever. Printouts about the success of the backup had stopped several weeks ago (he "forgot to call me") and the consultant who went on site told me that the tape was actually off the spool - hard to back up to a brioken tape. Also, the tape drive itself (one of those ultra-cheap Travan things I hate so much) was apparently now kaput. Later, the owner called me again wanting to know how the tape could be bad because the last printout (six weeks ago!) said that it backed up and verified sucessfully! Duh!

So, anyway, he's sent the drive out to a data recovery firm. As fsck has already been run and failed, I'm not extremely hopeful that he will get much back. There might be something on the broken tape, but even that could be weeks old.. I suppose that's better than nothing, and you could say that being too cheap to use more than one tape that it is all his own fault - believe me, I advised him about tape rotation more than once - but I still feel sympathy for the guy, and a smarter fsck might have saved his bacon.

-- Tony Lawrence