topic Re: Orphaned Inodes in Operating System - Linux

Orphaned Inodes

Bob Manocchia — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:25:16 GMT

I recently had a problem accessing one of my servers. I could get a login prompt and entered my password but could not gain access. I tried the system console to no avail. I cold booted and spotted the following entries in the boot.log:

Sep 28 22:11:59 andover fsck: /dev/vg00/lvol4: Clearing orphaned inode 229382 (uid=518, gid=522, mode=0100600, size=32768)
Sep 28 22:11:59 andover fsck: /dev/vg00/lvol4: Clearing orphaned inode 229385 (uid=1003, gid=1004, mode=040700, size=4096)

Does anyone know what can be do to prevent this in the future.

Re: Orphaned Inodes

Steven Schweda — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:15:05 GMT

If you whack a hung system, and then boot it,
it should not be a surprise if fsck finds a
few things to tidy up. There's no guarantee
that these complaints have anything to do
with the reason for the original performance
problem.

> I could get a login prompt and entered my
> password [...]

Were you "root" or some peon user when you
did this?

> [...] but could not gain access. [...]

What, exactly, does this mean? Did
_anything_ happen after the password was put
in?

> I tried the system console to no avail.

Again, an accurate, precise description of
what you did, and what happened when you did
it, might be more helpful than a vague
description.

> Does anyone know what can be do to prevent
> this in the future.

Hard to say, until someone figures out what
the actual problem was. Many things are
possible. A user with an NFS-remote home
directory can suffer from NFS problems. Any
user can suffer from problems in his shell
start-up scripts (.profile, ...). The system
could be very busy doing something of great
(or little) value. And so on.

Try to collect more useful info if it recurs?

Re: Orphaned Inodes

Bob Manocchia — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:34:09 GMT

I was using putty and entered my own user id and password. It did not go any further than that. On the system console I received no prompt at all.