brown@dlogics.UUCP (Steve Brown) (11/22/89)
Any /All suggestions cheerfully accepted. VMS Filing system woes - premature transient End File detection and ACL messups On a newly installed VMS system, we are having two very peculiar filing system problems. One of these is a permanent effect (VMS creates the file with wrong ACLs), while the other problem is transient (the file length gets truncated for short periods of time). The first problem encountered on the system is that ACL inheritance is sometimes wrong. If, for example, version 1 of a file is currently open (as in just created and open for write) and you come along to create version 2 of the file, it will sometimes get the wrong ACL's attached (manytimes it will get the ACLs that the directory had, and sometimes it will get random data). This particular problem fails about 10% of the time. The more vexing problem is that we are getting premature ends of files (actually file truncation). If a file were, say 17 blocks long (17 of 18 allocated), we'll sometimes get ends of files on records that cross block boundaries at the allocation cluster size (3, 6, 9, etc.). One time that we caught this in the act with ANALYZE/RMS, it reported that the file referred to an illegal VBN number 4 (the file at this point showed as 17 blocks length with 3 allocated). After 5 minutes, this situation will eventually cleared itself up. DEC imagines that the file header cache is being corrupted somehow. This problem has happened on 2 machines (6310's) in a cluster, with either one or two machines up. DEC has run extensive diagnostics to no avail. The machines are running VMS5.1B, and it's a dual HSC70 environment with shadowed RA82's. There are also 4 VS3100's clustered to it, but they are idle at the moment. The failure happens on 2 of the user volumes, and has not been seen on the system drive yet. Anyone who has any insights into the problem, a good contact at DEC, or a workaround (turning off the file header cache was suggested but has not been tried yet) would be welcome. Steve Brown Datalogics, Inc. 441 W. Huron St. Chicago, IL 60610 uunet!dlogics!brown 312-266-4380