On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 02:52:53PM -0500, Douglas Tutty wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 01:09:56PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 11:49:39AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > > > While I'm waiting for someone to *fix* bug 405506, does anyone have an
> > > > idea how to recover from it? Is a reinstall in order?
> > > >
> > > > Yesterday aptitude reported
> > > > Unable to parse package file /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
> > > > This happened on an etch that was just installed the same day from a
> > > > previous-day netinstall daily build.
> > > >
> > > > The file does exist, and appears to be binary gibberish.
> > >
> > > In the bug report, you say:
> > >
> > > | tried startx, got the black screen of death -- completely unresponsive
> > > | to mouse or keyboard.
> > >
> > > Hard rebooting a wedged system can result in corrupted files in rare
> > > cases, and it sounds like this is what you have. The pkgstates file is a
> > > plain text file. The chances of this being an aptitude bug seem very
> > > near to zero. Unless you or someone else can reproduce the bug (either
> > > the hang starting X or the file system corruption), it's certianly not
> > > grave severity.
> >
> > It is starting to look as if it was a problem with jfs, which, I was
> > told, was specifically engineered to prevent this kind of trouble.
> > Certainly, if it was an aptitude bug, it would have been grave. But
> > since aptitude seems not to blame, I think we should consider it solved
> > for aptitude. Perhaps it should be referred to jfs? I'll leave the
> > decision up to you. I don't think there are enough specifics that this
> > bug would help the jfs maintainers to find the problem, so there may be
> > no point.
>
> > I had used jfs as file system because reports on this mailing list
> > indicated that it was more resistant to this kind of thing than either
> > ext3 or reiser. But I've never had problems of this sort with either of
> > them, and had problems with jfs the first day I used it, so maybe in
> > the reinstall I should go back to reiser of ext3.
> >
> >
> Hi Hendrik,
>
> I missed the start of this thread but I use JFS (and it may have been my
> comments that prompted you to use it).
It may indeed.
>
> Was this file open or being used when the system crashed or lost power?
I suppose it's possible that I might have left the interactive aptitude
running while I did the startx. But it wasn't doing anything, and it
would surprise me if aptitude left it open for writing. Though I
suppose jfs might haver delayed writing the buffers out after the close
for reasons of its own.
> If so, I don't think there's any filesystem that can protect an
> individual file in that case.
Journalling is supposed to be able to protect data -- not that it
necessarily protects everything that was written to the file, but that
it can guarantee leaving the file in a consistent state.
> I wish there were. The problem I had
> with other filesystems is that after such a power loss, the filesystem
> itself would be corrupted and I'd lose data during recovery.
>
> Its also possible that whatever caused the system crash overwrote the
> files' buffers which then got dutifully committed to disk. This would
> not be a problem with JFS itself.
No. But it could possibly be blamed on the monolithic design of the
Linux kernel, which leaves it impractical to assign responsibility to a
particular software package. Not that that's likely to be fixed
anytime soon. Maybe I shoudl try hurd one of these years? Is it
different?
>
> I'm also a little leary of X. Since by its nature it takes over one's
leery
> video hardware, if it crashes it can leave you with not console. I tend
> to leave a getty runing on a serial port for just such emergencies (grab
> a computer or terminal, a serial null-modem cable and away you go).
One of the things they did right, though, was the client-server
separation. You can sometimes isolate bugs by running the client and
the server on different machines.
>
> I'l be watching to see what other JFS issues appear from this.
I suspect I'll be wiping the evidence soon, since I see no practical way
of using it to identify the problem. And reinstalling seems to be the
easy solution.
>
> Good luck,
>
> Doug.
>
>
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