Re: Files not touched in weeks got truncated after a crash

Guido Winkelmann
2013-11-14T10:11:28Z

On Wednesday 13 November 2013 22:43:23 Stefan Ring wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 9:39 PM, Ric Wheeler <ricwheeler@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You should update your kernel - this sounds like an issue that Dave fixed
>> quite a few months back (and got shipped in RHEL and other distros, I don't
>> know about when Centos would pick it up)
>
>It's in the CentOS 6.4 kernel, according to the release notes:
>https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6
>/html/6.4_Technical_Notes/kernel.html (BZ#855139)

Hm, this could be it, but it still sounds a bit unlikely.
The bug description implies that the filesystem would have to have been idling
from the point where the affected files were written until the point of the
system crash (or unclean unmount), such that the old, and by that time
incorrect, metadata updates would still linger in the journal, but that was
not really the case here. The filesystem was quite busy during those weeks....

Also, the bug report speaks only of zero-length files, while many of our files
had been truncated to lengths other than zero.