Re: Ext2fs getting hosed by fsck
Malcolm Beattie (mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk)
Mon, 11 Aug 1997 16:08:51 +0100 (BST)
Albert D. Cahalan writes:
>
> Take a good look at that. None of the files have the owner write
> bit set, which would be the eigth bit I think. The device numbers
> generally range from 32 to 116. It looks like ASCII text got into
> your inodes.
>
> Why does e2fsck keep the '?' files? They seem completely
> illegal, at least as far as /bin/ls can tell.
>
> If e2fsck finds several severely corrupt inodes, I think it
> should go into a suspicious mode that throws out anything
> with extremely weird permissions. For example, I've never
> seen ------x-w- on a real file.
NQS, a batch queuing system, uses the low 9 mode bits of various parts
of its spooling hierarchy to encode the state of the system. It's
incredibly ugly but at the time NQS was developed it had to run on
some Unices which didn't have enough/any locking to provide robust
enough synchronisation. On the other hand, some upper bits such as for
the file type aren't valid and can't be created directly from
user-mode so maybe they ought to be rationalised before putting the
inode into lost+found.
--Malcolm
--
Malcolm Beattie <mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk>
Unix Systems Programmer
Oxford University Computing Services