jam <[email protected]> writes:
> On Wednesday 15 July 2009 09:18:46 [email protected] wrote:
[...]
>> > I recently had a problem with imagemagick utils filling the disk to 100%
>> > which makes your problem seem familiar.
>>
>> That shouldn't cause GRUB to report error 15, which is that the kernel or
>> initrd image on disk was not found — baring concurrent activity that tried
>> to update those, I suppose.
>>
>> > BTW building imagemagick from source cured the issue but both SuSE and
>> > ubuntu did it
>>
>> I am curious to know what the specific change this made, and which
>> addressed the issue, was?
>
> Daniel I did not spend the time :-) I was using gallery2 on my www server.
> Using imagemagick specifically 'identify' the attached file caused 100% du I
> rebuilt the latest stable (um ... ImageMagick-6.5.4-0.tar.bz2) problem
> vanished and I continued with OtherStuff.
Alas. It would have been nice to know what caused the problem, because
filling a disk is (as you note) a pretty serious issue, and I would love to
know what the problem was.
You see, that way I could /know/ that it was solved, and that systems I have
to maintain were no longer at risk.
I guess if you upgraded the software and don't see the problem any longer then
it was *probably* some bug or other that was fixed ... but I don't see how you
can sleep well at night knowing that this same issue might pop up again at any
time. ;)
> DiskFull means no shutdown and no sync means PowerSwitch can lead to all
> sorts including grub errors.
Actually, a full disk means "free some disk space", most of the time. I have
often enough recovered systems without any adverse effects; it is one of the
unending joys of supporting small businesses who are happy to keep dumping
documents to a system until it runs out of space. :)
Even without that, most systems will shut down reasonably cleanly with a full
disk, at least in my experience. Applications may not be able to write out
state, but they usually were not able to do that before shutdown started.
Even leaving all that aside, yes, an unclean restart *can* cause disk issues,
but generally speaking a full disk will not cause data that was already safely
written to disk to be changed, corrupted or otherwise touched.
So, yes, it /could/ be that an unclean restart caused grub problems, but it
isn't very likely *unless* something was actually modifying the grub or kernel
related files at the time.
Oh, and a pro tip: if you /do/ need to uncleanly shut down the system when the
disk is full, try this as root first: 'sync; sync; sync'
That should encourage anything that /can/ be written out to be written out,
and will minimize the damage. You can even do better:
mount / -o remount,ro
# ...and repeat for every other mounted physical filesystem.
sync; sync; sync
That way you make the filesystem read-only. Software will work even less well
afterwards, but that prevents other changes, so you should have a consistent
filesystem after a reboot, even if you don't have consistent data.
Regards,
Daniel
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✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ [email protected] ☎ +61 401 155 707
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