[ale] Directories swapping contents!?!?!?

[ale at advancedopen.com (Brian W. Neu)]

I've seen this before.  It's the work of the Filesystem Gnomes, not to 
be confused with the related species of Underpants Gnomes plotting world 
domination.  The Filesystem Gnomes are still a frustrating group 
nonetheless.

Actually, if those directories are shared via Samba, then I'd suspect 
end user error/mischief.  I cannot tell you how many client's I've seen 
with errors due to users accidentally deleting network files/folders. 
Even with logs proving their guilt, end users claim complete innocence, 
or just complete stupidity.


Beware the Underpants Gnomes!

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> I've just seen highly weird behavior on my file server.
>
> I have a RAID 1 set across two 160Gb drives, and it has two directories 
> that are shared out individually via Samba.  The RAID device, /dev/md0, 
> is formatted ext3.
>
> Quite inexplicably, the contents of the two directories have swapped 
> places.  Machines connecting to the server see the switch, and if I 
> shell into the server itself and look at the two directories, that's 
> exactly what has happened.  /proc/mdstat looks normal, nothing shows up 
> in dmesg or /var/log/everything/current.
>
> Apparently there has been some sort of filesystem corruption, but the 
> result is awfully specific, and apparently the kernel modules involved 
> don't think there is anything wrong.
>
> WTF?
>
>
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