tmpfs problem [Was: Re: extremely strange results with "mail" or "make" after one day uptime]

[Harald Schmalzbauer]

Harald Schmalzbauer schrieb am 10.06.2010 11:17 (localtime):
> Harald Schmalzbauer schrieb am 10.06.2010 10:10 (localtime):
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I have absolutley no idea how it comes:
>> After one or two days of uptime, 'make -j3 buildworld' just returns 
>> without any error but without doing anything.
>> Also sending mail via 'mail' produces mutilatet output: no valid rcpt, 
>> no subject.
>> When I reboot the machine everything is fine again.
>> Daily status reports also stop working; that's how I found this 
>> absolutley mysterious spookie thing.
>> And: sshguard destroys hosts.allow. It's suddenly empty.
> 
> It seems that any text handling routine gets crazy because 
> /var/run/jail_XXX.id is also empty when starting new jails.
> It worked at machine boot, since older running jails do have a number in 
> their id file. Only newer started/restarted jails have an empty id file.
> Also the hosts.allow gets reproducable emptied by sshguard.
> 
> Where's the part of FreeBSD doing such text manipulation?
> Maybe that's also responsable for makefile parsing and such explains the 
> 'make' failure? Interesting is that 'make' without -j3 at least starts 
> the build, but reproducable fails at different points while src tree is 
> absolutely consistent. If I mount it elsewhere everything compiles fine.
> 
> And to ephisize: This mysteric behaviour of some base system components 
> appears only after some uptime. I haven't seen it the first day after 
> fresh booting.
> 
> Anybody any ideas? I'm desperate because I don't know here I could start 
> to search/test.

Ok, luck seems to be with the stupid this day ;)

I identified tmpfs as the culprit.

'head /etc/hosts.allow' correctly returnes two lines!
'head -n 2 /etc/hosts.allow' > /tmp/test results in a empty file
'head -n 2 /etc/hosts.allow > /var/tmp/test' produves a file with the 
expected two lines.

Ok, next time I'll better adhere to developers experimental warnings...

Is there anything I can do for the hackers? I haven't had that symptom 
before on any other machine and I'm using tmpfs for quiet some time. 
Maby it's an interesting edge case.

Thanks,

-Harry

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