The original question was:
> Lately, I've witnessed several cases of files turning out to be
> corrupted after system crashes. I know it CAN happen, but what I
> think is strange is that:
>
> - the vast majority of cases occur in Solaris-2.5 and Solaris-2.5.1
> machines (This is a way to say that I can't remember it occurring in
> Solaris1 machines, but I can't tell for sure. For the records, we
> have about the same number (~200) of machines running each system.),
> and that
>
> - the vast majority of cases (again) affect system configuration files
> like /etc/hosts and /var/yp/binding/`domainname`/ypservers that are
> updated nightly.
>
> I begun to suspect the fsflush process is malfunctioning after a test.
> First, I created a file with vi and waited more than 60 seconds before
> switching the power of my machine off. After the reboot, the file was
> corrupted. Then, I did it again, but, this time, I waited a whole
> hour before switching the power off. This second time the file was OK
> after the reboot. (I'm sure nobody sync'ed the file system
> meanwhile.)
>
> I couldn't find much information about fsflush but, according to the
> System Administration Guide, Volume II of the Solaris 2.5 System
> Administrator Answerbook, page 1454, the default rate at which fsflush
> is run is 30 seconds. The problem is that I waited more the 60
> seconds (in the first test) and, apparently, the file hadn't been
> flushed to disk yet.
>
> Am I missing something? Can somebody help me with a clue?
I've received several responses, almost all of them telling me to
apply patch #103640-08. Apparently this is a know problem with
vanilla Solaris-2.5 AND Solaris-2.5.1. I'm getting all the
Recommended patches for Solaris-2.5.1 (103640 is one of them) and
intend to apply all of them as soon as possible.
Thanks to the following people:
Ric Anderson
Russ Poffenberger
Glenn Satchell
Casper Dik
Per Boussard
Rachel Polanskis
Michael Kohne
Marc S. Gibian
Mark Bergman
Bruce Rossiter
Vinay Somashekar
Bismark Espinoza
Gustavo.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:51 CDT