Re: [gentoo-server] interesting occurence

[Ben Munat]

Unfortunately, this is my only server -- handling several live sites and 
email -- and I don't have the funds to rent another server while I 
figure out what's up with this. I will, however, talk to the hosting 
company... not sure what they could do but...

The machine -- a celeron 1.8 gHz, I believe -- had a basic gentoo system 
on it when we rented it, and then I emerged all the apps I wanted. So, I 
didn't set up the partitions or the filesystems. Here's the fstab:

/dev/hda1     /boot     ext2            noauto,noatime          1 1
/dev/hda3     /         reiserfs        noatime                 0 0
/dev/hda2     none      swap            sw                      0 0

Haven't seen any other filesystem glitches, but it was inaccessible for 
a bit last week. (That could have been the whole hosting company 
though.) Maybe there was a hard crash around then.

Well, I dunno... I appreciate your advice.  Was hoping, however, that 
someone one the list had actually heard of this sort of thing occuring. 
I'll talk to the hosting company... maybe they'll just move me to 
another machine to be safe.

Ben


Jonathan S. Romero wrote:
> That's fairly high in the scary meter.  I would be surprised if the
> problem lies with qmail.
> I would reccomend taking the system down for testing, including long cpu
> tests, and memory stability tests, from a liveCD.
>
> What filesystem were you using again? Any RAID configuration, special
> processor settings?  It really looks like the filesystem got messed up
> somehow.
>
> -Jonathan S. Romero
>
> Ben Munat wrote:
>
>> Not sure what you mean "maildir style names"... the names of the files
>> were random bits of (I believe) a single email. So, the file listing
>> looked something like this:
>>
>> root@foo>ls
>> somerealfile.txt
>> myrealpackage.tgz
>> been meaning to call and talk to him but I
>> anotherrealfile.jpg
>> the other day. So, Bob was saying that I could probably get a
>> anotherfile
>> etc.
>>
>> This isn't an actual listing... I deleted the files already. They were
>> empty files and their names were seemingly random bits of text.
>> However, I recognized pieces of that text to have come from an email
>> that my Aunt sent me a while back.
>>
>> Very strange.
>>
>> Ben
>>
>>
>> Jonathan S. Romero wrote:
>>
>>> Did the files have maildir style names?
>>>
>>> -Jonathan
>>>
>>> Ben Munat wrote:
>>>
>>>> Here's a weird occurence that has me stumped. Logged into my gentoo
>>>> server and did an "ls" in root's home directory. Mixed in with all
>>>> the files I expected in there were a number of empty text files...
>>>> and here's the strange part: the names of the files were random
>>>> snippets from an email that I received a while back!
>>>>
>>>> Now, if I remember correctly, that email was actually routed to
>>>> root, so I guess at least the email that got sliced up into file
>>>> names did come from root's maildir... it didn't come from somewhere
>>>> else on the system. But I had thrown that email away a long time
>>>> ago... though, I haven't done an "ls" in root's home dir in a while,
>>>> so I'm not sure how long the files have been there.
>>>>
>>>> Well, I'm running qmail... anyone have any ideas how text from a
>>>> mail file gets scattered around as names of files?
>>>>
>>>> Ben
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>