slight emergency here...

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 01:54:54PM -0800, Gary Kline wrote:
> 	Guys,
> 
> 
> 	I think I've found the reason for the intermittent rashes.
> 	Part of /var is bad, and fsck cannot allocate inoinfo to repair
> 	the damage.

Oops. If fsck can't fix it, that's not good. Have you tried running fsck
by hand, i.e. without -p? If you run it from the console it can fix a
bit more than when running in preen mode, but this may result in data loss.
 
> 	At any rate, how do i as root, single user, cp -rp all of /var to
> 	elsewhere (/storage) and rmdir /var, them mkdir /var and copy
> 	everything back?? I've forgotten the cpio magic command. 

Make sure that the hardware isn't broken. If you have (S)ATA disks, use
'smartctl -a /dev/<yourdevice>'.

The canonical way to make backups is to use dump(8). Unmount /var and
use 'dump -0 -a -f <dumpfile>'. 

But if the filesystem is really hosed, it might not be possible to copy
everything. In that case make a copy with dd of the partition that /var
is on so you can try to save any data that has not been backed up.

Probably the safest way to go is to newfs the filesystem that /var is on and
restore your latest backup.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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