Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?

[daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com>]

On 26 February 2010 12:33, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I got my wife's machine booted today using a install disk and
> played a bit with e2fsck. The machine stopped being happy last night
> due to some sort of corruption on the /var partition. e2fsck
> complained about 3 or 4 files and then repaired the partition. The
> machine booted cleanly as far as I can tell.

Hey buddy!

This happened to me, too!  See below for my savage ranting for a good laugh.

My rule for this is rsnapshot my present system as it is, grab a disk
image backup (taken less frequently), and then go to town with
portage.

I emerged 620 packages today.  (Much more in fact if I count
rebuilding and stuff.)  Only OO.o update is remaining in world.

I don't think there's a good and safe way around it.  I find inode
corruption can be sneaky and hit other stuff.  Assuming your backs all
exist and stuff, then you can hit up stuff like rsync with the update
flag for your personal files between newest and safest backups.

Rant:
Okay, so Mac OS is getting it to the face now, officially, and forever
in my world.  I've almost kind of said this before, and I can't
remember why I don't follow my own advice, but nothing can be worse
than twice-monthly 10% inode corruption.

Now check this out:
The e2fs program is told "do not mount sda3" and "if you ever do,
mount it ro."  Even though Mac OS is crazy enough not to use
/etc/fstab, it will still (supposedly) listen to rules in here.  I
found some very retarded way of effectively serial-device referencing
sda3, and I said, "do not mount this drive at boot, and if you do, do
it ro."  Then I went into a Disk Utility thing.  I told that the same
thing.  So that's three times I've said, "Never touch this drive with
a 10 foot pole, plz thx!"  Yeah, please explain to me how an
unmounted, only ro drive can receive  rectal examination of 11.4%
inode corruption.

Others, please take this as a lesson (in some form or another).  I
think it's the badly coded e2fs program, but that thing is so bad that
if it is to blame, it happened after I tried to uninstall the program
too, so who knows.  So I'm going to put a tiny Tiger install this
weekend so I can get nice boot, a few firmware accesses (kill the
silly booting sound, and delay an annoying 20 second boot delay in the
case there is no EFI partition...ugh).  And then I am going to never
look at it's ugly face again.

System Rescue CD, partimage, and rsnapshot are my friends!

(I had so many packages because over the holidays I didn't do sync and
world updates, and then I decided to go back to the wonderful ~x86,
but since I was super busy and I don't like backing up a system that's
untested, then I didn't have good backups of the updates.  Maybe a
poor choice, but in any case, that was not the reason I was trying to
kick myself in the face.

Be bloody lucky,
or don't use retarded softwarez---
daid

>
> So, something went bad and I managed to sneak around it for a while
> and now I'm sort of living with the machine wondering what to do.
>
> Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of
> knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come
> back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely.
>
> As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to
> go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and
> wait?
>
> We've got decent personal data backups as well as basic /etc data.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>
>