problem with invisible/disappearing files - but inodes there

[invader_zim@cia.com.au]

Hi,

We have an unusual problem with 'invisible' and disappearing files: some files are not
visible in a directory using 'find' or 'ls' on the directory, yet they
are visible using tools such as 'debugfs' or if you know the actual name
of the file, you can use 'ls' to list it explicitly.

For instance, in the directory:

/home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch

you can ls -la it, and find no files:


stampy:~# ls -la /home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch
total 8
drwxr-sr-x    2 louisb   staff        4096 Jun 25 11:45 .
drwxr-sr-x    7 louisb   staff        4096 Jan  4 14:05 ..

Yet when you 'ls' the files directly (which we find from the log of a
daemon that places them there), they are there:

stampy:~# ls -la
/home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch/1088004896841
-rw-r--r--    1 louisb   staff           1 Jun 24 01:34
/home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch/1088004896841
stampy:~#

This is occuring on two machines running Debian Woody, 2.4.25 and 2.4.18
kernels. The filesystems have had fsck run on them, and the systems are
not able to clean the /tmp directory because of these 'missing' files

Other info:

ext2 filesystems
libc-2.2.5.so
gcc version 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)

On both machines, the problems are showing up in the /tmp/CGI_Cache
directory. The filesystems have not run out of inodes

Any ideas what could cause this? It has happened on a 3rd machine now
too. One of the machines uses hardware scsi RAID and the other two are
using IDE (different chipsets, one VIA, the other AMD)


Thanks for any pointers,

Campbell