Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: The Inode-Eating Bug Message-ID: <1989Oct3.175425.624@twwells.com> Date: 3 Oct 89 17:54:25 GMT References: <906@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Lines: 24 In article <906@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen Mueller) writes: : 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. The inode bug can pop up right out of the blue, from full inodes to none at all. I've even seen it happen. What kind of system do you have? I have a bug fix for Microport SysV/386 3.0e and maybe Interactive 2.0.2. Making the bug harmless is fairly easy. And I'm willing to lend a hand in swatting this bug. Drop me a note if you are interested. --- Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill bill@twwells.com