Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bellcore!porthos!sapphire!gwf
From: gwf@sapphire.bellcore.com (George W. Fleming)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Recovery of an 'out-of-sync' file system
Message-ID: <1991Jan31.134749.19755@porthos.cc.bellcore.com>
Date: 31 Jan 91 13:47:49 GMT
Sender: @porthos.cc.bellcore.com
Organization: Bellcore
Lines: 30
Originator: gwf@sapphire

We recently had a most curious thing happened to our Sun server, I was
wondering if anyone has seen this.  I am interested in how to prevent
this from happening again and how to fix it:

Problem:  A NFS client noticed, while performing a 'make', that many of her
files (that reside on the server) had their contents swapped, i.e. the
contents of file A now appears under the filename B, the contents of B
appears under the filename C, etc.

Hardware Configuration:  Server is Sun Sparc 1+, running 4.1.1.  The client
machine is also a Sparc 1+, running 4.1.  The Ethernet is twisted-pair.

My Guess on What Happened:  A glitch occurred over the network while 
the client is attempting to 'sync' with the server, causing the inode/
superblock table to be displaced or messed up.  

Even though contents of all the files should still be on the disk, I was
not able to figure out how to recover them.  I tried Sun's fsck and all
it did was to eliminate some files that it did not like.

Does anyone know why this occured.  How to prevent it. And is there a way
for recovering from such a problem?  Any info/experiences would be 
appreciated.


-- 
-------------------------
George W. Fleming
gwf@sapphire.bellcore.com
-------------------------