Crashing on unused advfs domain

From: Roy Smith <roy_at_popmail.med.nyu.edu>
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1999 21:42:06 -0500

A while back, we had our usr_domain, on /dev/rz0g, get scrogged. We just
created a new domain (usr2_domain) on another device, created a
usr2_domain#usr fileset, restored /usr from backup to this new fileset, and
mounted it as /usr. I didn't delete the old usr_domain, just in case it
turned out there was something unexpected we needed to recover from it.
This worked fine some some weeks.

Suddenly, in the last few hours of the old year, we crashed with an advfs
panic, and when the machine auto-rebooted, it got into an infinite loop of
crashing and rebooting. Almost immediately after rebooting, we would get:

Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: AdvFS I/O error:
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Volume: /dev/rz0g
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Tag: 0xfffffffa.0000
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Page: 1
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Block: 48
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Block count: 16
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Type of operation: Write
Jan 1 13:11:20 shamrock vmunix: Error: 5

Now, this was really strange, since rz0g is the old usr_domain which wasn't
being used any more. The domain still existed, but nothing was mounted on
it. The old line in /etc/fstab for usr_domain#usr was commented out.

Booting single user worked just fine. I could verify and mount all the
domains in use with no problems, but as soon as I went to multi-user, I'd
get the same crash, almost immediately. After a lot of head-scratching, I
just removed the line completely from fstab and did an rmfdmn on
usr_domain. This cured the problem, and the system came up fine after that.

Anybody have any clue what might have been going on? Why would the system
even be touching a file domain which isn't being mounted?


Roy Smith <roy_at_popmail.med.nyu.edu>
New York University School of Medicine
550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Received on Sat Jan 02 1999 - 02:42:57 NZDT

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