Wollongong's WIN/NFS -- apparent serious bug
Mark McWiggins
and on the whole have been pretty happy. Today, however, we ran into
a pretty serious bug.
There's a known bug with the group system across NFS. For example,
if I'm in group "staff" and run vi on a file of which I'm the owner
but has group set to "other", when I try to save the file the system
truncates it to length 0. We reported this to Wollongong, and I
presume they're working on it.
Today one of our users was accessing the system via NFS, and did a
chmod on one file. This apparently caused some weirdness in the kernel,
because the system locked up with a bunch of console messages referring
to "s5page" and also "link table overflow" (sorry I didn't take notes).
We couldn't get anything done from the console, finally having to just
turn the system off and back on.
It wasn't a catastrophe, but we did lose a few files; so far we've found
sed, fgrep, and date to have been corrupted. Fortunately, we were backed
up, but it was pretty scary.
I'm not *positive* this was Wollongong's bug, but the evidence certainly
points there. I've been banging pretty hard on this system for several
months and have never seen anything like this, and it did happen right
after the NFS chmod.
If I turn out to be wrong, I apologize in advance. I believe the
Wollongong rep reads this group, and will no doubt respond. Their tech
support was quite good when I dealt with them during installation.
Mark McWiggins
Integration Technologies, Inc. (Intek)
1400 112th Ave. SE #202
Bellevue WA 98004
(206) 455-9935
uunet!intek01!mark