[Box Backup] Possible fs corruption

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Sune,

On Thu, 8 Sep 2011, Sune Mølgaard wrote:

> After getting some errors about being unable to attain a writelock,

That probably means that the filesystem was already corrupt and remounted 
read-only before you upgraded.

> I installed svn trunk as of yesterday, and (for good measure), tried to 
> run a bbstoreaccounts check fix. I immediately got a weird error to the 
> effect that I was working on read-only media, and sure enough, the ext4 
> fs with my system on it had aborted the journal, leading Linux to 
> remount ro.

Aborted journal usually means bad sectors on the disk.

> Furthermore, when running fsck, it would seem that the superblock was 
> corrupted, so much of the system got linked into /lost+found, resulting 
> in a crippled system.
>
> I'm restoring as we speak, and I cannot say if the bbstoreaccounts check 
> fix actually did this, and am wary of trying again, when the system is 
> fully operational again, but if you recall having made some changes 
> recently, that could do something like this, I'd advise you to 
> double-check the code...

If bbstoreaccounts is running as a non-root user, and your permissions on 
/dev/sd* are correct (no write access except to the root user) then it has 
no chance of corrupting the filesystems.

Even if you run it as root, it does not deliberately directly access the 
disk (open /dev/sd* in any way) unless that was specified in the 
configuration files, which it should not be.

I don't think this is a bug in Box Backup.

What changes were you referring to that might have had an impact on this?

Cheers, Chris.