RH8: filesystem corruption when spooling to networked printers

[Brett Blatchley]

I've setup (jetdirect) network printers on a stable kickstarted RH8 system. I'm noticing serious filesystem corruption that seems to be associated with printing to these tcp/ip printers. The problem is intermittant, but it manifests itself in the same way:

Certain /bin utilities are rendered useless. For example /bin/grep /bin/gawk will start to segment violate. When I try to use chmod, it will corrupt certain some files and work right on others. By this time, the system is rendered unbootable because certain utilities are corrupted.

It always seems to be the same utilities that get trashed, both by my inspection and rpm's (rpm -V -a). The utilities involved are in sequential (or near sequential) inode numbers -- this makes me suspect that something is raw-writiing to the harddisk. The files are written over or corrupted even when they are write protected.

It's not equipment -- identical thing happens on different equipment. The equipment used has been exhaustively memory and disk (r/w) tested with no faults. It's not communication since it happens on the customer's site or in my office.

What I'm wondering, but have not yet seen, is whether the network printing to raw devices such as /dev/tcp/192.168.0.104/9100 are getting confused and maybe being written to, say, /dev/hda7 (the root drive). What happens if the print driver script (/usr/share/printconf) tries to write to say, /dev/tcp//9100?

I'm logging a ps -aef and listing of /bin/grep every minute along with logging information I've added to the above script to try to find out what's running when this happens. (/bin/grep always gets trashed in the same way, so if I see this tell-tail, I know the system's trashed.)

Any ideas? Similar experiences?

Thanks All!

Brett Blatchley




Blatchley Computer Architecture & Development
B.Blatchley at Computer.org
(336) 345-5039