steve@mrc-applied-psychology.cambridge.ac.uk (Steve Platt) (08/31/89)
Eric - exactly what sort of rubbish did you find? If it was really null characters, sounds like one of the NFS "features", I think that NFS clients "stat"ing a remote file while it's being written can cause whole blocks to get zero-ed out ... however:- We had some trouble a while back when our 3.5 mail server got its root filesystem full and /pricate/usr/spool/mail is in there of course ... We got users invoking mail, ignoring a message like "/: filesystem full" and getting garbage header lines printed, so they "quit" from mail (silly people!); thus writing that junk back into their mailboxes - the garbage was often a repeating 4byte pattern (maybe a 32 bit number) with sometimes a solitary "Status: O" in the middle. Of course, Mail didn't think much of that second tiome around - sort of shocked me that Mail didn't handle the lack of space (for /tmp/files?) better. By the way, our full / filesystem was due to cron dying in the middle of my fortnight away - ergo big log files! Also, the number of sunos utilities that did silly things when / filled was amazing - I take it real programmers don't check the return value from write(2)!