[CentOS] File-system Corruption

Wed Apr 6 23:03:41 UTC 2011
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Apr 6, 2011, at 6:06 AM, James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi List,
> 
> I suppose this isn't strictly CentOS but I'm talking about some 5.5
> servers so I thought someone else here may have had the same issues;
> 
> We power on servers at night via IPMI and shut them down the same way
> for automation. The problem I'm facing is that the servers are
> shutdown in about 2 seconds. IPMI provides remote access to the power
> features as we know so I don't think the OS has a chance to do a
> 'graceful' shutdown.
> 
> One server in particular is told to shutdown at say 07:00am, the last
> scheduled task on there should finish around 06:30 so there is a half
> hour window for over run. It now has a corrupt XFS file system which I
> am repairing as we speak. I am wondering if this could be a possible
> cause of these problems? Perhaps if that last tasks over runs a couple
> of times and it gets powered off in the middle of the tasks? (These
> are backup servers rsyncing from other servers)
> 
> Does anyone here have problems with this?

File systems are memory based objects that (loosely) don't exist on disk until shutdown. You yank out the power, who knows what you'll get, and it doesn't matter when the last job ran because the OS can be running house keeping functions on the file system in the background.

-Ross