I ran RHEL 5.x for many years on z/VM 5.4 and on z/VM 6.2 without any file corruptions. Have you verified that there is not a minidisk overlay on z/VM side? Of course a minidisk overlay would probably corruption move than one 4K block.
-----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Donald Russell Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2013 11:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: EXTERNAL: file corruption on RHEL 5.8 RHEL 5.8 zLinux on zVM 6.1 using ECKD disks We have a recurring problem where files get corrupted. It always happens in the same directory, and we always wind up running fsck in single user mode to get the file system back together. The file system is EXT-2. (We changed from EXT-3 on this FS due to numerous journaling errors which caused the FS to go to RO mode) In the case I'm currently working on, a ".so" file (binary) has a chunk of plain text in the middle of it. The "chunk" is 4K bytes long, and is a piece of a program listing. 4K is the block size of the underlying DASD. I am now in the process of trying to find when this happened by restoring backup copies and seeing if I can narrow the time frame down. Obviously I don't expect a "do this to fix the problem", but what I'm wondering is, has anybody else encountered this? What could cause a block in the middle of the file to be overwritten this way? Are there any tools I can run (preferably while the system is at runlevel 3 or 5) to check if two (or more) files are using the same block in a file? I envision a "bad block pointer" somewhere, but how does that happen? I'm considering converting the file system to EXT-4... I don't think there's a conversion per-se, I'd create a new EXT-4 FS then copy all the files from the EXT2 FS to the EXT-4 one. Any suggestions/help are greatly appreciated. Thank you, Donald Russell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
