Need !help! with Reiserfs problem

[Charles Marcus]

Hi everyone,

Sorry this is so long, but I have a problem that I would really 
appreciate some guidance on from someone who has some Reiserfs experience...

Environment:

Courier-imap 4.0.6 IMAP server
maildirs stored at: /var/virtual/domain.com/maildir, which is an 
LVM/Reiserfs partition

Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 IMAP client

I have a lot of folders and messages (I subscribe to a lot of mail 
lists), and was doing some cleaning up. I generally never mass delete 
more than a few hundred messages at a time, but... well, I thought I had 
selected a few hundred, but right after I hit delete, I noticed it 
wasn't 300 I had selected, it was @ 30,000. Well, I decided to let it go 
and see what happened, but Thunderbird kind of went into never-never 
land, to the point I had to kill it, and then it did this every time I 
clicked on the Trash folder.

I tried deleting the local cache files from the TBird profile but the 
problem remained, so there was definitely something wrong on the server 
side.

I don't have much experience manually manipulating maildirs, so would 
appreciate comments...

First, I simply took a peek - the directory listing for the .Trash 
folder looked like:

gondor .Trash # ls -al
total 47960
drwx------   6 postfix postfix      256 Jul 17 07:08 .
drwx------ 116 postfix postfix     4192 Jul 17 14:27 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 postfix postfix       17 Oct 31  2005 courierimapacl
drwx------   2 postfix postfix       72 Jul 17 07:08 courierimapkeywords
-rw-r--r--   1 postfix postfix  7603094 Jul 17 07:08 courierimapuiddb
drwx------   2 postfix postfix  9100472 Jul 17 12:40 cur
-rw-------   1 postfix postfix        0 Oct 31  2005 maildirfolder
drwx------   2 postfix postfix       48 Oct 31  2005 new
drwx------   2 postfix postfix 32388568 Jul 17 12:04 tmp

Every subdirectory was fine, except the /tmp - when I tried ls -U in it, 
my SSH session went into never-never land.

I repeated this while monitoring with top in one console, and tailing 
/var/log/messages in another. There was nothing unusual in the logs, and 
the ls process never used more than 5% of CPU, and 2-3% RAM, although

What I was going to do was first delete the folder:

rm -rf /var/virtual/domain.com/maildir/.Trash

then once it is all gone, do:

maildirmake -f Trash /var/virtual/domain.com/maildir

But decided that this might make matters worse, since rm would have to 
traverse the directory... so, in order to get a working Trash folder, I 
simply did:

mv .Trash SKIPME

then

maildirmake -f Trash /var/virtual/domain.com/maildir

Which fixed my Thunderbird/Trash problem.

So, this is where I am now. Everything is fine, *except* I have this 
SKIPME directory that has a broken /tmp directory inside it.

I am have very little experience with filesystem repair in general, and 
have read horror stories about reiserfsck destroying filesystems, so, 
some questions...

1. Can I *safely* run 'reiserfsck --check' on a LIVE system/filesystem? 
Just to check and see if it actually finds any filesystem problems?

2. What is the probability that as seemingly minor a problem as this 
will result in a totally trashed filesystem if I attempt to repair it 
using reiserfsck? Its not like this was from an unexpected power loss or 
anything...

Thanks for any/all assistance and/or suggestions. Pointers to HowTos, 
ReadMe's, or any other fine manuals will be fine/appreciated...

Charles