Storm formation [LWN.net]

Storm formation

Posted Oct 27, 2012 23:40 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Storm formation by man_ls
Parent article: An update on the ext4 corruption issue

Nah, for me this was a moderate problem. I just had to run a backup before each reboot. It was very annoying, but that was all. (Now, the first restart, when I found the corruption for the first time -- that could have been worse, only by chance I'd run a backup the day before. Take that, Murphy!)

Your aviation point is well-made: you need a very long concatenation of unlikely circumstances to trip this bug. If Eric Sandeen is right, it's been around since v3.4 came out. I suspect that if v3.4 and v3.5 hadn't been so stable that I hardly ever rebooted, I'd have tripped it a few months ago, June or July -- right in the middle of a DTrace for Linux deadline crunch. But they were stable. Murphy misses again!

This is the second problem I've had in the last two months that was resolved by having up-to-date backups, after years of never needing them. (The first was a power spike that blew up my desktop box, last month). I've seen comments on lots of forums from people saying that this has caused them to run backups more often -- so this has had a major positive impact, in my eyes. Perhaps I should arrange to find a new horrible-but-in-hindsight-obscure filesystem corruption problem every year or so, just to keep people backing up properly. :)

I note that counting the desktop box failure without data loss this is the third Murphy's Law swing-and-miss in six months. I'm in for some *massive* negative karma now.

What will it be?

An asteroid impact?

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Storm formation

Posted Oct 28, 2012 7:48 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

On the other hand, an asteroid impact might be a bit too much to compensate for a couple of timely backups, depending on the size of the asteroid; at least an extinction-level event would be definitely overblown. Perhaps originating a news storm around a relatively minor bug might be enough "punishment"? Actually, I think that having to run a bzr repo is adequate compensation.