arndt@zyx.ZYX.SE (Arndt Jonasson) (02/06/91)
It seems we found a bug in HP-UX yesterday. I'm not sure, because we don't want to try it again. Our configuration consists of one HP9000/350 with a few disks, and a couple of diskless machines of the same kind. "uname -a" says: HP-UX coca 7.0P0826 B 9000/350 coca For a certain reason, we wanted to know what error message the 'rmdir' command would give us when told to remove a non-empty directory, so, being non-root, and therefore not risking anything, logged in on one of the diskless machines, we did rmdir / The server panicked. And of course all the diskless ones followed it. I know I should have written down the panic message, but I forgot. (To increase the probability of this happening, if you try it yourself, you may want to make sure someone is saving a whole day's valuable work at the precise time you do this.) -- Arndt Jonasson, ZYX AB, Styrmansgatan 6, 114 54 Stockholm, Sweden email address: arndt@zyx.SE or <backbone>!mcsun!sunic!zyx!arndt
robs@hpuamsa.neth.hp.com (Rob Slotemaker CRC) (02/07/91)
As far as I can see this occurred only once before, but it was with a 9000/800 running HP-UX 3.0. The document describing that problem says : > There appears to be a race condition between reading a directory > (a direct read such as through ls, not a pathname lookup) > and removing a directory. A directory being read is not locked > during the read. If, after it starts reading, someone does a rmdir > on that directory, the panic can occur. Another way for the panic > to occur, is for someone to rename another directory to the name of > the directory being read.\ Does your problem occur on every rmdir of a non-empty directory ? Are you sure you don't have a bad disk (run fsck !) ? Shouldn't uname -a report "HP-UX coca 7.0 B 9000/350 coca" ? Best regards, Rob Slotemaker, Dutch CRC
franks@hpuamsa.neth.hp.com (Frank Slootweg CRC) (02/08/91)
Arndt Jonasson writes : > "uname -a" says: HP-UX coca 7.0P0826 B 9000/350 coca Rob Slotemaker writes : > Shouldn't uname -a report "HP-UX coca 7.0 B 9000/350 coca" ? Indeed your system should *not* say "7.0P0826". This is an HP internal prerelease ("P" for prerelease and "0826" for August 26 (1989). Rob was still a customer at the time, so he probably did not know. And yes: Smart customers can become HP employees :-)). The official 7.0 release came out over a year ago, so that is what you should have and run. While your current problem might not be related to the use of prerelease software, I strongly advise you to install the official 7.0 release. And just to make you feel better, I just did the following on my diskless client : franks$ rmdir / rmdir: /: Is a directory franks$ pwd /users/franks franks$ mkdir one franks$ touch one/two franks$ rmdir one rmdir: one: Directory not empty Why the two messages are different? Beats me. They are both right. And who said that UNIX will always give the same answer? :-) Frank Slootweg, Dutch Customer Response Center.