demasi@paisano.UUCP (Michael C. De Masi) (12/08/87)
Hello Again,
You may remember me as the fellow who posted the origional
problem regarding inodes and news. To recap, inews (and
expire, I later found out) were causing massive amounts
of inodes to disappear from the free list. This was
happening on an all too regular basis, and administration
was becoming a nightmare, since the only seeming fix was
to unmount and 'fsck' the file system every time it happened.
First, I'd like to thank everybody for the myriad of responses
and explanations I received on the problem. I received quite
a few possible solutions ranging from simple administrative
tasks to kernel rewrites. I also received a large number of
responses from people who were in the same predicament.
And now, the solution. It was pretty much reached as a
concensus that the problem had to do with the in-core
inode table wrapping around before it had a chance to
reload itself from the disks and therefore convincing
itself that the system was out of inodes. This could
happen anywhere that high volume file deletes/creations
were taking place, such as in a news spool during news
creation/expiration. If only there was a way to increase
the size of the table enough that it would always reload
itself before it wrapped around. If only the table size
were a tunable parameter. It is: NINODE. I basically
doubled the size of NINODE (which of course added a couple
of K to /unix) reconfigured, and I haven't had the problem
since. (It's been about three weeks)
I'm now anxious to know if this simple solution will work
for others with the same problem. Unfortunately, this site
is not licensed for source, so I'm sorry if my explanation
of the problem/solution is a little shaky. Any corrections
or expansions on what I've said are entirely welcome. If
you try this and it works, or even if it doesn't, please
write me a short note & tell me your results.
WARNING, WARNING, WARNING: DISCLAIMER:
I DO NOT SPEAK FOR AT&T ON THIS MATTER, SO PLEASE DO
NOT TAKE MY WORD AS GOSPEL!
But hey, you knew that, didn't you? :-)
So now, all seems well. In fact, my only problem
is figuring out what to do with the tons of news
accumulating on my machine since the problem got
fixed.
Till next time, Ciao!
---
Michael C. De Masi - AT&T Communications (For whom I work and not speak)
UUCP: decuac!grebyn!paisano!demasi
"It's the President, Buckaroo." "President of what?"