Article View: comp.sys.sun
Article #1358Re: System mailboxes corruption
From: Steve Platt
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1989 10:16
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1989 10:16
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Eric - exactly what sort of rubbish did you find? If it was really null characters, sounds like one of the NFS "features", I think that NFS clients "stat"ing a remote file while it's being written can cause whole blocks to get zero-ed out ... however:- We had some trouble a while back when our 3.5 mail server got its root filesystem full and /pricate/usr/spool/mail is in there of course ... We got users invoking mail, ignoring a message like "/: filesystem full" and getting garbage header lines printed, so they "quit" from mail (silly people!); thus writing that junk back into their mailboxes - the garbage was often a repeating 4byte pattern (maybe a 32 bit number) with sometimes a solitary "Status: O" in the middle. Of course, Mail didn't think much of that second tiome around - sort of shocked me that Mail didn't handle the lack of space (for /tmp/files?) better. By the way, our full / filesystem was due to cron dying in the middle of my fortnight away - ergo big log files! Also, the number of sunos utilities that did silly things when / filled was amazing - I take it real programmers don't check the return value from write(2)!
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request From: steve@mrc-applied-psychology.cambridge.ac.uk (Steve Platt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: Re: System mailboxes corruption Keywords: SunOS Message-ID: <1355@brazos.Rice.edu> Date: 31 Aug 89 10:16:19 GMT Sender: root@rice.edu Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 22 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 114, message 3 of 15