panic: ifree: freeing free inode HEELLLPPPP!

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <1192 at dataio.UUCP> braman at dataio.UUCP (Rick Braman) writes:
>dev = 0xd, ino = 12327, fs = /usr/spool
>panic: ifree: freeing free inode

I saw this fairly regularly on a system with which I work, and
was mystified.  (Ultrix 1.1 on Vaxen.)  It turned out that the
operators, to do backup, just turned the modems off and did an
fsck and dump.  They rather blindly answered "yes" to each and
every question.  When they were instructed to bring the systems
all the way down before doing any of this (and then forced to
by some cleverer software), these disappeared.

The problem was, of course, that BSD has at least a dozen back-
ground processes working hard to corrupt the disk at all times.
Usually, of course, they are helpful: but to fsck, they are just
corruption.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy at hadron.COM (not yet domainised)