Filesystem panic

[Martin Pool]

On 22 Oct 2003, Morten <lists at kikobu.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running RH9, 2.4.20-18.9. Each night, the server mounts
> an external FAT32 disk using firewire, and performs backups
> to it using rsync.
> 
> Twice within the past 3 months, the backup process has resulted
> in machine crash (complete hang, hardware reboot needed).
> 
> From /var/log/messages:
> 
> Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 08:21).
> Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel:   fat_free: deleting beyond EOF
> Oct 22 04:02:20 yoda kernel:   File system has been set read-only

You probably need to report this to the vfat fs maintainer

VFAT FILESYSTEM:
P:	Gordon Chaffee
M:	chaffee at cs.berkeley.edu
L:	linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org
W:	http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee
S:	Maintained

> From the rsync error log, I can see that the filesystem becomes
> read-only, and that it begins to fail the synchronization task with
> 
> mkstemp 
> SAGER_igangvaerende/2003_07_Fremtidens_Uni/Fase_4/Diagrammer/Celletyper/
> .Delecelle.psd.Rz49bM failed: Read-only file system
> 


> Which is understandable. After doing this for a while, the error
> message changes to "Too many open files". And I suspect that this is
> what causes the machine to hang. 

Can you please try to reproduce the problem, and then do

  lsof -p PID_OF_RSYNC

for each rsync process sometime before it starts complaining about too
many open files.  Then kill rsync to avoid the problem.

> Is there any way to configure rsync to abort execution once the
> first error occurs?

Not at the moment.

-- 
Martin