[comp.bugs.sys5] The Inode-Eating Bug

scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen Mueller) (10/03/89)

Chalk up YA site being bitten by the System 5 lost inode bug.  My vendor
doesn't do Unix anymore (that I know of), and it's not a terribly standard
system, so I have little hope of seeing the bug fixed.  Since it is of
course hitting my news spool filesystem hardest, I would like to mitigate
the effects by hacking [ir]news to spool the entire batch on a low inodes
condition.  The necessary code changes were entirely trivial; however, I
have no idea of whether they are really meaningful.  Does anybody know how
the out-of-inodes condition progresses?  that is, does a stricken system
decay steadily from the "real" inode count down toward 0 or 1, or do things
look normal until blammo! ifree is (<100|=1) or whatever?  Perhaps a periodic
repost of one of the analyses of the problem would be useful.
-- 
Scott Hazen Mueller| scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (ames|pyramid|vsi1)!zorch!scott
685 Balfour Drive  | (408) 298-6213   |Mail to fusion-request@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG
San Jose, CA 95111 |No room for quote.|for sci.physics.fusion digests via email