My files just *disappeared*

[flugh]

I have been a Linux user off-and-on both professionally and in my hobbyist personal life for quite a few years now. I had something new and ... exciting? ... happen to me yesterday.

I noticed some quirks with qmail (yeah, I was messing with it, poking around with some utility scripts I found) and some parts not running just right. They were being handled by tcpserver or something (runs via an entry in /etc/inittab). Anyway, something was amiss, I was too lazy to RT-second-page-F'ing page of the Manual to see what might have been up. Plus I wanted to test a remote reboot just to see if I could get back in remotely after reboot.

After successful remote reboot and logging in again (I used 'reboot' to reboot, and login via ssh), I noticed that everything on /dev/hda9 was -gone-. No messesages in /var/log/messages, nothing amiss during bootup apparently, just a few megabytes of new free disk space.

Gone. Poof. No warnings, no nothing. Just ... empty space.

Okay, luckily I had just backed up and restoring from backup was trivial. But now I am a bit less confident in my 'rock solid server' operating system. It has taken the liberty of snacking on a couple website's worth of data. Golly, next it will be the company database?

My point is, anyone have a similar experience and care to share any findings? I've moved beyond it, but it would still be nice to know just what, if anything, I did wrong.

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JBR

 

[flugh]

Sorry, I guess I should mention it is an ext3 filesystem. The distribution has nothing to do with it I'm sure, but it was Debian/Stable with whatever kernel version comes stock (I think it's a 2.4.18) in case you're wondering.

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JBR

 

[RhythmAce]

All I can say is, this never would have happened with Red Hat. You also never should have left your sendmail roots and gone over to qmail. Now be it far from me to criticize a mans drinking habits but I don't suppose this had anything to do with the fifth you had on the fourth.

 

[flugh]

Well, there was a Fedora Core 1 install cd sitting _very close_ to the machine. And Fedora is a Redhat thing. Coincidence? I think not

Why qmail? I'm not up to learning the gory details of sendmail. It appears to be WAY more MTA than I need. And

http://www.qmailrocks.org/

had a nice step-by-step installation guide. Not 'better or worse' reason, just what I ended up doing

No, no drinking was involved in this one. It's pure Bermuda Triangle stuff. I still think it was due to that Fedora CD being so close to the hard drive...

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JBR

 

[RhythmAce]

Fedora close by you say? Now it's all starting to make sense. I think your system was deleting itself so it could install a superior distro.

 

[flugh]

Which I think would illustrate the Window's origin of Redhat Linux. It wants to just delete everything and reinstall the operating system instead of fixing the problem nicely ;-)

Next Redhat or Fedora release will feature default .bashrc:
alias 'scandisk' = 'fsck'
alias 'defrag' = 'sleep 360'

;-)

PS: I still haven't found my data. I restored the files. Didn't think until afterwards about using a hexeditor to look at the raw device, just to see if the data was still there. Not that I have the skills to save data in that state, but it'd be nice just to know.

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JBR

 

[chriseubank]

Sounds like an "rm -rf" mishap to me

hehehe

No clue

 

[flugh]

Well, it's official. I can't figure out exactly what the heck happened! But I've moved on, got stuff restored, and in the process came across

http://kanotix.de,

a Knoppix-ish live-cd distro based on Debian/Unstable and Testing (Sid). Pretty nifty, and a real nice group of people on irc.freenode.net:#kanotix. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

I'm going back under my rock now. Made major headway with my Access database yesterday and am still basking in the glory ;-)

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JBR