Re: 3.6.25 - Journal replayed back to 3 weeks ago

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 13:47, Neil Robinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this morning when I started up my notebook (running Windows XP) with a
> VMware session running Gentoo, the boot sequence claimed that the
> reiserfs drives had not been cleanly umounted (not true, I powered down
> the usual way on Friday evening -- su to root and then issued the
> poweroff command). It then replayed the journals of the two partitions
> using reiserfs. When it finished and booted, it was as if my entire
> machine had stepped back in time by 3 weeks or so (to around the 23rd of
> December). Since then I had installed and built openoffice, emacs, and
> numerous other bits and pieces. I also lost all of the email that was
> living in the courier-imap server.
> 
> I am *very* concerned about this behaviour. I have successfully
> restarted, booted, etc. literally dozens of times since mid-December. I
> have now just installed a software RAID using RAID 5 on Gentoo and using
> reiserfs for a fairly large system (250GB on 8 SCSI U160 drives) with an
> available hot spare and a tape backup unit. Losing a few weeks of
> relatively insignificant changes is nothing compared with possibly
> losing the contents of my company's master file server. Can anyone tell
> me why reiserfs rolled back all the way to mid-December in spite of
> numerous reboots and how I can avoid a rerun of this scenario *ever*
> again. Is ther some way to tell it to commit its changes that I am not
> doing and should be aware of?

That's not supposed to happen.  Lets start with details about which
version of the kernel you were using.

-chris