dump level 9

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Paolo Tealdi wrote:

> I will do a newfs on saturday afternoon, after doing some backups 
> (also on tape). After this, if the problem  persists, i'll do the pass 
> 2, 3 and 4.
> In my opinion something gets damaged at filesystem level after an 
> energy block (date are similar). I did an fsck (more times) but the 
> problem persists : probably fsck doesn't recognise the problem. 

By energy block I assume you mean a power cut?  It's certainly 
suspicious but without actually understanding what is causing the 
problem, hard to be sure if there is a relation.  I'm struggling to 
understand how "ls" can show a date in 2003 for a file, while dump 
thinks that the inode has changed since your level 0 a few days ago.  
I'm no expert on the filesystem, but that's just weird.  I don't see how 
a power cut could have done that or what problem fsck could fix

>
> It could be important to do debugging for this problem, but it's a 
> production disk (big) and i can't "play" with it too much.
> Thanks a lot for your support.
>
One more thought off the top of my head.  What does ls -lsak /home/.snap 
show?  I know there can be issues with snapshots in the 5 series and 
having more than one snapshot can be a bad idea.  I don't think that's 
it because your dump -S without -L showed pretty much the same as with 
-L, but just in case.  If you do find any snapshots (I believe dump 
would leave one called dump_snapshot or .dump_snapshot or something 
obvious if it gets interrupted (by a power failure, for example) then 
you can delete with rm.  I don't hold out much hope but it's easier than 
a dump/restore).

If no-one else replies here with bright ideas, you could also try 
posting to maybe freebsd-hackers or freebsd-fs; 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/eresources.html#ERESOURCES-MAIL

Good luck.  If you try the newfs, please let us know how it turns out.

--Alex