Thomas, Thanks for your response. Due to a defective (ADSL/ISDN) splitter I was not able to respond earlier. So far the problem did not occur again. Since it was late at night that the phenomenon occurred I might have done something stupid. I did test with a working directory that I deleted from another xterm. In that case I could not create or copy any file into the directory. So I am still puzzeled. However I intend to upgrade to a newer kernel, because it might be that there is a problem somewhere in the software that deals with reading, writing and cacheing to the ext2 filesystem (which I would call a driver of some sort) Thanks again, Hans Feringa PS: some answers to your questions below. On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, THOMAS ADAM wrote:
Hi,
Lets see if I can help,
SuSE 7.2 with 2.4.4-4GB kernel
Today I ran into the following problem:
I created a directory. Mozilla failed to see the directory, so I copied the link location and used wget to download a file into this newly created directory.
How exactly did you use wget to do this?? It is strange that Mozilla did not find the directory, sicne mozilla has a built in "file browser".
wget URL
Incidentally, under which account did you create this "directory"??? A regular user. The one that started mozilla.
Then I wanted to switch with another xterm to this directory, but could not. It was not there. However in two other xterms it was.
Umm, this is suggestive. It seems as if the directory has been deleted.
It indeed looks like it.
I double checked to see if I was in the wrong directory, but wasn't. I mv'ed some downloaded files from this newly created directory to another directory on the same filesystem. It took some time and a lot of disc activity, which is strange for a mv on the same filesystem (a ext2 filesystem btw).
Yes, it is strange that it took a long time.
To test some things I opened a new xterm and su'ed to root. Directory was not there. I created this same directory(name) at the same location, and it did not collide with the directory in the other xterm. I removed it, and still it did not conflict with the directory with the same name and location in the other xterm.
Yes. It would seem that your original directory had been deleted (which explains why you were able to create it again). The reason why it showed up in your two other Xterms is because your current working directory was the directory which you created.
Since you say that you could not cd to this direct
It appeared as if I was into 2 different environments, like onto two different machines??
No. Not at all. (see explanation above)
Looked like it but ofcourse wasn't.
Finally I decided to reboot the system. The newly created directory (and some others I created at the same time, in the same directory) were gone. However the files I mv'ed out of these directories were still there. I did some tests with creating directories and creating files in them, but could not reproduce the ghost directory problem any more.
I don't suppose you can remember the permissions of these directories?? Did you try running "fsck" (as root), thus:
fsck /
I did not run fsck. I don't remember the permissions but I think they were 755 (umask = 022)
You might want to check the folder "/Lost+Found" to see if that folder contains some lost fragments.
Nothing was in Lost+Found.
I did investigate log files to see if there was a hardware problem with one or both of my SCSI disks, but could not find any evidence of it.
One of my other fears is that there is some kind of Trojan Horse into my system.
Lol, this is highly unlikely since not many viruses exist for Linux. The only potential damage that could occur is if you are logged in as user "root".
The most severe damage that can occur for a non-root user is having their "home/$USER" direcory deleted.
Another one is a possible problem with the driver for the ext2 and/or the SCSI driver.
There is no "driver" for ext2. Ext2 is simply the layout of the disk system. And I very much doubt the problem lies with your SCSI driver since you said that the rest of your files were intact.
Again, check the folder "/Lost+Found". This is where the "fsck" binary puts lost file fragments.
I've no clue what might have happened. Can anyone tell me what might have happened and how I could solve this?
I hope I have given you a start.
Regards,
Thomas Adam "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" --
A Student at the "Southampton Institute", Southampton, Hants, ENGLAND
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