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From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Alzheimer's Syndrome
Message-ID: <21942@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 17 Sep 88 03:17:11 GMT
References: <576@mbph.UUCP> <406@amyerg.UUCP>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lines: 24
In-reply-to: appleton@amyerg.UUCP's message of 16 Sep 88 19:23:05 GMT

appleton@amyerg.uucp writes:
   In Mr. Hybl's article, he mentions his /usr4 file system losing it's
   "memory" and suddenly running out of inodes. I have been encountering the
   same problem with my /usr system. I have a 3b2/300, am running news
   2.11 patchlevel 14, and take a full newsfeed.

This problem was discussed quite some time back (a year?), and the
result was...

...it's a bug in the SysV filesystem.  There is a fencepost error in
the inode caching of the SysV filesystem code, where a large number of
deletions (such as during expire(8)) can cause the kernel to mess up
its concept of inode availability.

A fix was offered for those sites with source, but the very great bulk
of sites out there can't put it to use, of course, lacking exactly
that very important resource.  The alternatives with which one is
stuck are either [a] keep your news on a large filesystem with MANY
more inodes available than you will ever use, or [b] periodically
(weekly? twice weekly?) unmount the filesystem on which news lives and
run fsck against it, which will always notice the bad inode count and
fix it.

--Karl