> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:28:25 +0200
> From: Holger Parplies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] Unable to connect to BackupPC server
> error
> To: Winston Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: backuppc-users@lists.sourceforge.net
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Hi,
>
> Winston Chan wrote on 28.03.2007 at 21:04:08 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Unable to
> connect to BackupPC server error]:
> >>>>> I had been running BackupPC on an Ubuntu computer for several months to
> >>>>> back the computer to a spare hard drive without problem. About the time
> >>>>> I added a new host (Windows XP computer using Samba), I started getting
> >>>>> the following behavior:
>
> first of all, your problem seems unrelated to the new host.
>
> > When I try to touch a file as root, I get "touch: cannot touch
> > `/var/lib/backuppc/log/LOG': Read-only file system."
>
> What you're seeing is that your file system is mounted read/write when you
> boot your machine, as it should be. BackupPC works. Then something comes
> along and remounts the file system read-only. That might crash BackupPC (in
> fact, I'd expect it to try to log a fatal error, which won't work, because
> it can't write to its log files, and then terminate). What can remount your
> file system read-only?
>
> 1.) The kernel. It does this if you mount the file system with the option
> "errors=remount-ro" or if the option is set in the file system metadata
> (and file system corruption is detected during operation, of course :).
> You can check with 'tune2fs -l /dev/whatever' (replace /dev/whatever
> with the name of the block device your file system is on, see the
> output of 'df /var/lib/backuppc', left column, if you're unsure) under
> the label "Errors behavior".
> Is /var/log on a different partition from /var/lib/backuppc? If so, you
> should be able to find a message in /var/log/messages if this happened.
> If both are on the same partition, your system log files won't have been
> written to after remounting either (which would indicate the approximate
> time it happened though).
>
> 2.) Some software doing something it's probably not supposed to. I wouldn't
> know who should 'mount /var/lib/backuppc -oremount,ro' or the like, but
> it's a possibility.
>
> 3.) A user pressing <Alt><SysRq><u> at the console. That would affect *all*
> file systems however. Remove either these three keys or the user who did
> it ;-). Or 'echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq' (see /etc/sysctl.conf if
> you really want to do that, but I strongly doubt that is your problem).
>
> > > Wasn't that Windoze, where you occasionally have to reboot because
> > > something
> > > stops working for no good reason? ;-)
>
> ... my point being that, with Linux, instead of rebooting, you'd simply
>
> % mount /var/lib/backuppc -oremount,rw
>
> (presuming /var/lib/backuppc is the relevant mount point), and you'll
> probably get an error message stating the file system has errors, which
> you'd need to fix with fsck (unmount the file system first!) [I haven't got
> a file system with errors available, so I can't check if remounting rw is
> really rejected; it might just work despite errors on the FS, so you should
> probably run fsck (after unmounting) anyway]. Let's hope it is something that
> *can* be reasonably fixed, considering it's grave enough for the kernel to
> remount the file system. Rebooting is not a solution in this case, it only
> hides the problem until it gets bad enough that all of your pool is lost.
>
> Are, by any chance, regular checks of the file system in question turned off
> ("Mount count" and "Maximum mount count" in the tune2fs output)?
>
> You should probably try to figure out whether the underlying disk has a
> problem (/var/log/messages is your friend and probably the smartmontools) or
> if it was only a glitch caused by software or a power failure or a user
> failure (you wouldn't believe what I found on my favorite messed up file
> system). Presuming you don't simply have a cron job that remounts the file
> system every few days :-).
>
> Good luck.
>
> Regards,
> Holger
>
>
Holger,
You have correctly identified the source of the problem. Followed your
advise and found that the directory is corrupted.
Thanks.
Winston
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