Disappearance of symbolic links' contents.

[Love]

Dr A V Le Blanc <LeBlanc at mcc.ac.uk> writes:

> I have been having a problem with arla 0.33.1 on Linux
> 2.2.16 with glibc 2.1.3.  On machines which are in heavy use,
> symbolic links tend to lose their reference.  Thus a link
> which normally appears as
> 
>      ls -l fred
>      fred -> george
> 
> will appear like this after a while instead:
> 
>      fred ->

Sorry for the late reply, have been looking around without finding anything
that will cause this. We have not seen anything like it around here.

What type of heavy use is it, what type of workload (large files,
continously hitting the same directory, many users simultaneously, etc) ?

The only thing I could think of right now is to try this patch, and see the
symlink indeed is 0 bytes long.

Love

Index: xfs_inodeops.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /afs/stacken.kth.se/src/SourceRepository/arla/xfs/linux/xfs_inodeops.c,v
retrieving revision 1.138
diff -u -w -u -w -r1.138 xfs_inodeops.c
--- xfs_inodeops.c	2000/07/17 21:21:36	1.138
+++ xfs_inodeops.c	2000/08/10 01:25:01
@@ -1515,6 +1515,8 @@
 	    printk(KERN_EMERG "XFS Panic: readlink on NULL cache file\n");
 	    return -EINVAL;
 	}
+	if (inode->i_size == 0)
+	    printk(KERN_EMERG "xfs_do_readlink: 0 length symlink\n");
 	size = (buflen > inode->i_size) ?
 	    (inode->i_size) :
 	    (buflen);