disk copy curiousities
Hello once more...
We've been merrily copying discs, using the same primary (i.e.
original, made last week from the Debian PA-RISC images), and
sufferring with lock-ups nearly every time. Naturally, that means
powering down without having cleanly dismounting the files systems.
Re-booting cleans them up, but I suspect that problems are creeping
in.
This morning, while running a copy, I fired up "top" to see what was
happening. Previously, this showed "kswapd" and "cpio" competing for
the most cycles. This morning, cpio didn't register (although the
lights on both units were burning). Instead, some process named
"if-post-down.d" was using up the CPU.
Following are two top screens, followed by a "which if-post-down.d"
that I ran to see what this "thing" was. As you'll see, the response
to "which" was unexpected. I later did a find on it, and located a
DIRECTORY with that name. It was empty.
I should add that other idiosyncrasies are showing up:
rebooting doesn't always find the keyboard
mounting the disc to be partitioned etc., causes an error
saying that it can't link /etc/mtab~ (I can't create one as
the keyboard doesn't yet support the ~ character).
Soft links fail: "ln -s a b" (i.e. make "b" an alias for "a")
creates a "dead" link named "b" which points to itself.
"man mount" (for example) sometimes fails, complaining about
groff character sets.
I'm baffled. Can any readers shed some light on what might be going
on? I certainly look forward to hearding from you.
Dean
--------------------top and which runs-------------
09:32:09 up 17 min, 2 users, load average: 0.44, 0.65, 0.49
32 processes: 30 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 3.4% user, 70.4% system, 0.0% nice, 26.2% idle
Mem: 61756K total, 59720K used, 2036K free, 2544K buffers
Swap: 124800K total, 4304K used, 120496K free, 49700K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
225 root 15 0 272 244 204 R 77.3 0.3 9:09 if-post-down.d
312 provinsd 16 0 1132 1132 912 R 15.1 1.8 0:00 top
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.7 0.0 2:02 kswapd
1 root 9 0 140 68 64 S 0.0 0.1 0:02 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:27 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kreclaimd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdated
9 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsi_eh_0
10 root -1 -20 0 0 0 SW< 0.0 0.0 0:00 mdrecoveryd
88 daemon 9 0 112 8 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap
150 root 9 0 216 108 104 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 syslogd
153 root 9 0 976 8 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:02 klogd
158 root 9 0 136 8 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 rpc.statd
170 root 9 0 128 8 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 inetd
176 root 9 0 140 8 4 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 lpd
09:32:14 up 17 min, 2 users, load average: 0.41, 0.64, 0.49
32 processes: 30 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 2.1% user, 91.9% system, 0.0% nice, 6.0% idle
Mem: 61756K total, 59720K used, 2036K free, 2508K buffers
Swap: 124800K total, 4304K used, 120496K free, 49684K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
225 root 13 0 272 244 204 R 87.7 0.3 9:14 if-post-down.d
312 provinsd 16 0 1144 1148 924 R 4.3 1.8 0:00 top
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 1.8 0.0 2:02 kswapd
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.1 0.0 0:00 bdflush
1 root 9 0 140 68 64 S 0.0 0.1 0:02 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:27 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kreclaimd
7 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kupdated
9 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 scsi_eh_0
10 root -1 -20 0 0 0 SW< 0.0 0.0 0:00 mdrecoveryd
88 daemon 9 0 112 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap
150 root 9 0 196 68 64 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 syslogd
153 root 9 0 976 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02 klogd
158 root 9 0 136 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 rpc.statd
170 root 9 0 128 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 inetd
176 root 9 0 140 4 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 lpd
provinsd@ICT-106-242:~$ which if-post-down.d
/mnt/usr/share/terminfo/h/ha8686: /mnt/usr/share/terminfo/h/ha8686: cannot execute binary file
---and a little later---
provinsd@ICT-106-242:~$ which if-post-down.d
/mnt/usr/share/emacs/20.7/lisp/play/gametree.elc: /mnt/usr/share/emacs/20.7/lisp/play/gametree.elc: cannot execute binary file
--
Dean Provins
dprovins@ucalgary.ca, provinsd@telusplanet.net
Linux is a stimulating and productive alternative to other PC operating systems.
Reply to: