VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:52:55PM +0200, Peter Schuller wrote:
> > Specifically, I have private departmental fileservers
> > that other fileservers rsync to using Mike Rubel-style
> > rsync snapshots:
> 
> FWIW, since you wondered about being alone in the world, I tend to do
> similar things but with rdiff-backup, with total file count ranging from
> a few hundred thousand to a few million. But I also routinely do stuff
> like rsyncing entire chroots with multiple ports/pkgsrc trees and
> whatnot. I mostly haven't experienced the problems you describe. (Always
> with UFS2 and softupdates, if you discount recent stuff with ZFS.)
> 
> The one thing I *have* experienced is filesystems going nuts after
> filling them. Specifically I end up with a negative amount of space
> free, and as soon as you release more space df -h quickly reports the
> amount of free space dropping (you can see it interactively churning for
> a few secs) until it settles at some negative amount again and you're
> back to square one. This has happened once or twice in the past, but not
> recently. Not sure which release it did happen on; might have been 5.x.

Yeah, this was an old bug in the 5.x timeframe.  As far as I recall it
was fixed at some point in the past.

> It's worth noting that the one thing I don't do is creating multiple
> links to the same file with any frequency, as happens with the rsync
> incremental backup approach.

I do a lot of hard linking on my system and have not encountered
issues.

Kris