Need !help! with Reiserfs problem

[Charles Marcus]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for taking the time to reply...

Peter Jakobi, on 7/19/2007 2:36 PM, said the following:
>> 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

> It's not necessarily a fs problem.

Well, that would be good news... :)

> How about 'find SKIP_ME | wc'?
 >
> Find doesn't care about sorting, so it should just spit out
> upto 30k lines of text...

Supposedly, ls -U doesn't care about sorting either (that's what the -U 
is for), so shouldn't it have done the same thing?

I'll try the find command later when there are less people using the 
system...

> btw.  I'm slightly wondering about /tmp:
> 
> If  you  indeed  managed  to  get  a */*tmp basename, you've created a
> really interesting problem, as there's no way to sanely specify such a
> filename, with / being directory  separator;  short  of  debugfs/clri.
> Both of which don't exist for reiserfs.

Sorry, I guess you were confused by the / when I said /tmp... I'm just 
talking about the tmp directory that is inside each maildir folder (ie, 
.../.Trash/tmp)

>> 1. Can I *safely* run 'reiserfsck --check' on a LIVE system/filesystem? 
>> Just to check and see if it actually finds any filesystem problems?
> 
> IT DOES NOT repair, so it doesn't write. But it might be confused
> due to write access. Try at least making the FS readonly for a while.

The reason I asked is this is a live server, being accessed by 40+ Sales 
Reps, 24/7... but it is looking  like I'll want to take it down, so I'll 
need to do it on a weekend, and give advanced warning...

> The more interesting options should be used with a backup at hand.

But of course... ;) and thanks again...

Btw, I'm surprised there is no way to simply delete a directory and all 
files inside without actually having to traverse the directory though... 
never had the need, so never ran into this limitation.