[comp.bugs.sys5] Netnews Disk Problems on 3B2

jallen@devildog.UUCP (Jon Allen) (04/18/89)

Help!  I am using an entire 135Meg SCSI drive on a 3B2 to store netnews.
The problem is that when I fsck the file system on a daily basis, it almost
always has file damage.  Can anyone tell me what could be causing this?  The
complete configuration is: 3B2/600 running SVR3.2.1.  The disk is a 135 Meg
SCSI device.  The filesystem is advertised read-only using RFS to several
other machines.

Some notes:
  1) Swapping disk drives (including swapping in a 300Meg drive) does not
     help.
  2) Making the main partition smaller than the total disk does not help.
  3) Could the "missing inodes" problem described earlier be causing
     this?  And if so, does anyone have an easy fix?
  4) The damage almost always concerns duplicate blocks, inodes, and
     missing blocks.  Eventually, fsck will never completly fix the
     disk, but rather will always report XXX blocks missing.  At this
     point we usually reformat the disk and start over?

Any help or points would be greatly appreciated.  I would also like to hear
if anyone else is experiencing this problem (as maybe there is some 
underlying bug).  Thanks in advance.

Jon Allen
UUCP:   {...}!att!acpy01!jallen
Domain: jallen@acpy01.att.com

rwhite@nusdhub.UUCP (Robert C. White Jr.) (04/19/89)

in article <651@devildog.UUCP>, jallen@uxrd12.UUCP (Jon Allen) says:
>   3) Could the "missing inodes" problem described earlier be causing
>      this?  And if so, does anyone have an easy fix?

 This dosn't quite sound like the missing inodes problem, but if you
havent goten the offical patch of the inodes problem perhaps you
should.  AT&T has an offical "patch diskette" the image for which
they will mail you (as a cpio archive).  you have to put it on a
diskette of your own and the sysadm installpkg the diskette into
place.

> Any help or points would be greatly appreciated.  I would also like to hear
> if anyone else is experiencing this problem (as maybe there is some 
> underlying bug).  Thanks in advance.

One of the things that kept happining to us were phantom problems with
a 300mb disk on the differential SCSI bus, it would just sort of choke
and die sometimes, other times it would not format, or mirror, or
whatever.  We reinstalled the "SCSI Host Adaptor Utilities" and
a companion diskette whos name escapes me at the moment (perhaps
SCSI drive utilities or some such).  This reinstalation and a
mkboot of everything in /boot (if you've never done this read the
directions carefully!) just for good mesure took care of all the 
phantom bugs on our system.

Rob White.

#include <stddisclaim.h>