RE: RedHat Disk Dangers? [was: Linux and ADSL]

[Scott Stone <SStone@example.com>]

yeah it was very strange... as I said when I put 7.1 on it I had it check
the partition for bad blocks - didn't find a single one.  and usually when
an IDE disk fails on Linux.. (actually, ALWAYS, when an IDE disk fails on
Linux), the kernel will log ATAPI bus reset and  IDE seek errors, and none
of that happened in this case.

I didn't even rebuild the kernel on that box, either, nor anything else that
could be defined as "core" (ie, libc).  all updates came from "Big Red" :)

so anyway, congrats to RH for f*cking up a distribution in such a way that
causes actual data loss.  Even I never did *that*.  Sure I had some betas
that wouldn't boot, but those were betas[1]


[1] don't even f*cking mention TurboLinux 1.4J.  I *really* dont want to
talk about that :)

-----------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Senior Technical Consultant - UNIX and Networking
Taos, the Sysadmin Company - Santa Clara, CA


-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:turnbull@example.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 4:28 PM
To: Scott Stone
Cc: 'tlug@example.com'
Subject: RedHat Disk Dangers? [was: Linux and ADSL]


>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <SStone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> why?  7.0 did something that I've never, in over 6 years of
    Scott> using Linux, come across.  For no reason at all, just
    Scott> COMPLETELY trashed my ext2fs file system to the point where
    Scott> /usr/lib was no longer a directory and /lost+found
    Scott> contained only spotty remnants of what used to be in there.
    Scott> No bad sectors on the disk

I've seen this.  I think it's a hardware problem in my case.  It's a
Fujitsu MO drive, media 217MB formatted IIRC.  But the ext2fs would
happily write past physical capacity and start reusing in-use blocks.
And trashing directories.  Including the /lost+found directory.  Oops.

Fortunately, that was for backup only and I found out about the
problem before I needed it....  :-)

Debian 1.2 (at that time), custom kernel 2.2.SingleDigit vintage,
vanilla Linus sources, no patches.  Didn't matter whether it was
mke2fs /dev/sdc or fdisk /dev/sdc1, mke2fs /dev/sdc1.  Red Hat
_always_ fucks with the sources, and unless you read the RPM spec
_and_ the patches, you never know what you're getting.  "Trust Big
Red" ... about as far as I could throw a sack with Bill Gates and Bob
Young in it.

As you say, I've never seen this on a fixed disk, and only on that
particular hardware in fact.


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