Hi,
While a tar file was created, the file system got full and there was no message on the tar failure. Then the system was shut down and the administrator says because the file system was full the shut down procedure corrupted the file system. I'm wondering, unix should have given some warnings/messages etc during shut down. Can the experts help us to understand what would have happened?
Thanks.
---------- Post updated 07-30-13 at 12:11 AM ---------- Previous update was 07-29-13 at 11:46 PM ----------
Red Hat Linux (RHEL 6) is the OS
Which filesystem got full? A full root i.e. / filesystem can do all sorts of nasty things... It'd surely already be spitting all kinds of errors, too, you might not even be able to login.
I don't know about disk corruption, though. It's more of a situation where disk space is needed to do things and disk space is not available, causing funny errors when you try to do things like logins.
I suppose, if people couldn't login, he may have had to hard-power-off the system.
"tar" will always issue an error message (as well as a non-zero exit code) in such a case. There could only be "no error message" because it was redirected to "/dev/null". Either the exit code or the error message should have been watched in this case.
At first sight i think this is hardly believable. I do not know the shutdown procedure of this specific system (which might be heavily customized to produce such results), but any normal shutdown-procedure will not bear such results.
Whats more, it happens all the time that filesystems become full. Why should a shutdown-procedure - any normal action a system undertakes, for that matter - corrupt a filesystem? Linux would not be the stable server operating system it is if any normal operation would cause filesystems - full or not - to become corrupted.
To be honest, lacking any further evidence, i think the admin is telling bullshit. Let him explain what exactly has happened and post it here if you can't prove//disprove it yourself.
I hope this helps.
bakunin