roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (02/17/90)
Every once in a while, a strangeness shows up in my /etc/mtab file.
Right now, it looks like:
stdin: not in comprc7decode: 0 0
/dev/ra0a / 4.2 rw 7 1
/dev/ra0h /usr1 4.2 rw 1 5
[etc]
This is pretty typical. It's obviously a message from compress
somewhere in the news system, and indeed this only started happening when we
put C news up. Damned if I can figure out how it gets into my mtab file.
It doesn't seem like random file system damage, since it's always more or
less the same message, always the first line in /etc/mtab, never trashes the
rest of the file, and as far as I can tell, never ends up anywhere but in
mtab. Furthermore, the two 0's at the end make it look like something tried
to coerce it to look like a standard 6 field mtab entry.
We're running MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS on a Vax-11/750. The date on the
/etc/mtab file is 14:49:12 (ls doesn't give you time to the second, but
other tools do), which must have been sometime during the time /etc/rc was
being run. The first process logged in our accounting file is (naturally)
/etc/accton, at 14:49:20, 8 seconds later. At this time, there shouldn't be
any news stuff running, other than /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsboot, which
just removes a few dead lock and temp files.
Does anybody have any idea what might possibly be going on?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/18/90)
In article <1990Feb17.023003.7444@phri.nyu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > This is pretty typical. It's obviously a message from compress >somewhere in the news system, and indeed this only started happening when we >put C news up. Damned if I can figure out how it gets into my mtab file. We've heard some strange C News problem reports, but this really takes the cake! :-) >... must have been sometime during the time /etc/rc was >being run.... At this time, there shouldn't be >any news stuff running, other than /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsboot, which >just removes a few dead lock and temp files. Which variant of rnews are you running, rnews.batch or rnews.immed? If the latter, that could explain how it gets started up at that time: when you went down, there was incoming news in a uucp queue, and /etc/rc is starting up uuxqt, which hands the incoming batch to rnews, which tries to run newsrun, which produces the message. One might perhaps get something similar with NNTP, although I'm not very familiar with the details of how it runs. (Geoff is on vacation.) As for how the message ends up in /etc/mtab... that's a bit of a puzzle, all right. However, I note that many /etc/rc's have ">/etc/mtab" somewhere to null out mtab during boot. If that is somehow being taken by your shell as a request to divert stdout or stderr into /etc/mtab, that could explain how a message from a child of /etc/rc got into /etc/mtab. I admit that I'd have a hard time explaining it in more detail! Investigation seems in order. -- "The N in NFS stands for Not, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology or Need, or perhaps Nightmare"| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
bob@pta.oz (Bob Vernon) (02/21/90)
In article <1990Feb17.023003.7444@phri.nyu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > > Every once in a while, a strangeness shows up in my /etc/mtab file. >Right now, it looks like: > >stdin: not in comprc7decode: 0 0 >/dev/ra0a / 4.2 rw 7 1 >/dev/ra0h /usr1 4.2 rw 1 5 >[etc] > > Does anybody have any idea what might possibly be going on? A customer of ours once had almost the same problem. Not the same strange message but one that just doesn't belong in the mtab file. The mtab file looked like :- Current timezone -10:00 west, Australian style dst (-600 minutes west, dst style = 2) /dev/iop/pdisk00a / 4.2 rw,noquota 1 1 /dev/iop/pdisk00d /usr 4.2 rw,noquota 1 2 [etc] Took ages to track it down but it was obvious once I realised what had happened. In our /etc/rc script the following sequence of commands occur :- /etc/timezone -600 2 >/dev/null [ about 2 screenfuls of comments and other commands ] cat < /dev/null > /etc/mtab One day someone trashed /dev/null. ("It looked like a silly name so I I removed it"). So guess what happened on the next reboot. I would guess that it is some similar sequence of clearing mtab on your system. -m------- Robert Vernon UUCP: pyramid!pta!bob ---mmm----- Pyramid Technology (Australia) ACSNET: bob@pta.oz.au -----mmmmm--- 328 High Street PHONE: +61 2 415 0515 -------mmmmmmm- Chatswood 2067 Australia FAX: +61 2 417 8636