disappearing files

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

On 7/28/2011 10:15 AM, admin at prnet.org wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am using FreeBSD 8.2 with an UFS filesystem containing a jail. I do a
> tar of the whole jail every night. Suddenly after a few weeks of
> operation, tar complains about being unable to stat /usr/lib/libmilter.so.
>
>> From inside the jail:
>
> ls /usr/lib | grep "^libmilter.so$" returns "libmilter.so"
> ls /usr/lib/libmilter.so returns "ls: libmilter.so: No such file or
> directory"
> ls -l /usr/lib>  /dev/null returns "ls: libmilter.so: No such file or
> directory"
>
> Trying to access the file from the main system gives the same result.
>
> A reboot returns everything to normal.
>
> Exactly the same also appeared on another machine some time ago, the only
> difference was that it appeared on another file.
>
> Does anyone know what can cause this problem ?

File system corruption would cause such behavior. And/Or perhaps
something is wrong with the underlying disk device.

I would search the logs for messages indicating that the storage
medium is failing. Does dmesg contain anything related?

I would also unmount and fsck the file system.

HTH, Nikos