i-nodes disappearing in SysVr3 filesystem

[T. William Wells]

In article <131 at dy4.UUCP> paul at dy4.UUCP (Paul Burry) writes:
: About a year ago, a problem was mentioned in this group where a bug in
: the System V filesystem was causing either i-nodes or blocks to disappear.

Inodes.

: Well, I believe I am now experiencing this very problem.  When running
: inews, the filesystem becomes corrupted and the number of free i-nodes
: suddenly drops from ~2300 to ~1.  Only performing a fsck on the filesystem
: restores the i-node count.

That sounds like the inode bug all right.

: Any help would be appreciated,

Fsck'ing your system frequently will cut down on the failures but will
not eliminate them. I've had an inode crunch within minutes of doing
a fsck.

If you have source code, or are handy with a disassembler, it is
fairly easy to patch the code. I can give you hints if you need them.

Of course, the right solution is to hassle your vendor. If he tells
you that this is hard to fix, tell him baloney. The bug is in
(s5)?ialloc and is trivial to fix.

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill