[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Circular directory references (was re: ext2 file too big...)



On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 03:26:31PM -0500, dman wrote:
> ls -ld
> 
> to find out which is a symlink and which is a real directory, then
> remove the symlinks (if you really don't want them).
> 
> It is not possible to have a hard link to a directory, so they must be
> symlinks.

Actually, I should give you more background than this.  These are not
symbolic links.  This is a screwed up ext2 filesystem.  There was either
a runaway sendmail process or a runaway mailman process that dumped some
nasties into /var.  I'm seeing corruption most likely from a sircam
virus or some such thing.  I'll look back into the sendmail logs (if
they're there) to see if I can track down the offending email.

Regardless of the cause, I have a corrupt file system with multiple
circular directory references, i.e. inode level, that fsck.ext2 refuses
to clean.

Originally, I thought it was a single file in a single directory that
was simply too big to parse.  I was wrong.  It's a major problem.

My only course of action right now, with my lack of knowledge of the
innerworkings of the filesystem, is to back up what data I can and
reformat the partition.  (Certainly doable.)

Regardless, I'm still curious about how to debug and recover from such a 
problem should it happen again in the future.

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions!

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net>                 | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/                            | s.k.a. gunnarr
Key fingerprint = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31  1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD

Attachment: pgp04gj3LKXSl.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: