lost inodes under ISC 1.0.6

[Garry M. Paxinos]

We have an system installed at a customer site that has been operational
for a few years.  As this is at an insdustrial site and has not had any
other problems, we have been rather reluctant to upgrade the OS...

Recently, the free inode count on the root partition started to decrease
until about a week ago the count dropped to zero.  Obviously the system
is now not operating...

I have verified that it is not our software by: deleting some unused
files in the root file system (so there were some free inodes to start
with,) and made sure that our software was not operating.  After a
day I called back in and the free inode count was again zero.  Before
and after comparisons of an 'ls -laR /' did not show anything usefull.

Does anyone have an idea of what is causing this and where the inodes
have gone?  I'd like to solve this without recreating the root file
system as this would involve a cross country service call for my
company (we're in South Florida and their in Washington state.)

Thanks for any suggestions..

Take care,
Garry.

pax at megasys.com