[TriLUG] ext3 surprise

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:34, Brian Daniels wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 01:21:08PM -0500, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> > In other words, ext3 gave you the advantage that you knew for sure that
> > /sbin/install-info was toast.  You were guaranteed of knowing which
> > files were inconsistent and which were fine.  Without any journaling,
> > there might have been files that passed an fsck fine, but actually had
> > garbage data in them.
> > 
> 
> Two problems here:
> 
> 1. ext3 gave no warning.  The journal recovered without errors.  If I 
> hadn't manually forced a fsck I would not have known of the corrupted file.
> 
> 2. /sbin/install-info was _not_ a recently written file.  It dates back to 
> 1-24-2003, from the original RH9 install.  The copy I was performing at the 
> time of crash was to the /home filesystem, on a separate partition from /.

I see what you mean.  I should have read your message more carefully
about the journal being clean.

> I'm starting to wonder if something else corrupted that file in the past, 
> and I'm only now finding it.  With ext3 you don't usually run fsck's.

Does ext3 ever move files around to limit fragmentation?  Or does that
only happen if you run a specific defragementation tool?  Otherwise,
yeah, it sounds like it may have been corrupted before.

--Jeremy


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