[svlug] Totally pooched file permissions

[DzM]

Rick Moen said this cool thing on 01/31/2007 05:34 PM:
> He/she'll want to run "lsattr" on it to see if, say, the immutable bit is
> set.  If that doesn't cure the problem, he might have to, over the long
> term, copy everything _else_ off, delete the filesystem, recreate the
> filesystem, and copy the contents back.

Hmm. Hadn't stumbled across lsattr before I resorted to fsck. fsck found 
many problem in the file system and repaired them by just unlinking the 
files,  then moving them to /lost+found.

> In his/her shoes, I'd also worry about how it got that way.  I once saw
> really bizarre file characteristics right after I partially fried the
> electronics on a hard drive.

I am a bit worried about how this happened. I'm not sure exactly what 
aspect of the system to blame:

o The system is a NSLU2 running SlugOS 3.10 (which is, evidently, in beta)
o The drive is a recycled IDE drive from an old retired laptop, pushed 
into an USB case so it works with the slug.
o The volume is dedicated to being a NFS mounted source repository for 
builds (kernel, firefox, whatever). The only things that happen on it 
are the standard build ops of whatever project I'm building.

So I have multiple possible culprits here. Beta OS on skunky lightweight 
device that may (or may not) be able to keep up with the traffic. An old 
IDE drive that might be in the process of failing. AutoFS/NFS uncleanly 
unmounting things and the server not noticing/fixing/protecting. Could 
also just be a power hiccup or something. I _did_ find the slug in a 
"off" state yesterday. That seems to imply unclean shutdown leaving the 
FS in a horked state (though I thought ext2/ext3 was supposed to take 
care of that for most circumstances).


Anyway - Thanks again to everyone for the help. I was hoping to avoid 
fsck, but ultimately that was the solution AND it only took five or ten 
minutes to bring things back to life. I spent many multiples of more 
time than that trying to chase down the meaning of the permissions in ls -l.