From: Alaric Turner (a.turner@albourne.com)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 12:18:03 EST
Many Thanks to those that replied,
as ever Dr Blinn of HP came up trumps,
basically the problem was that a change has been made in defragcron
(possibly in Patchkit 4)such that it deleted /dev/null every time it ran.
alaric
Dr Blinns' reply in full:
>That's bizarre. I run V4.0G but I disabled defragcron long ago.
>
>It's a shell script; go see if you can spot a point where it does
>an "rm -f" or whatever on /dev/null. A privileged user (and you have
>to be running as root to run defragcron) has sufficient privilege to
>remove /dev/null and if the device name is then used as the output
>from some command invocation, it will be recreated as a "normal" file.
>
>I see in the version of the script in the patch kit output area this
>stuff:
>
> quiet_file="/dev/null"
>
> /bin/rm "$quiet_file"
>
>and if you are root and that quiet_file is "/dev/null" and you do that
>/bin/rm then /dev/null is GONE. This was NOT in the original version
>of the script, someone put it in there as a "maintenance fix". Do
>not run defragcron, it's dangerous anyway.
>
>
>Tom
Alaric Turner wrote:
> Managers,
>
> I seem to have a somewhat strange problem, on a DS20 running 4.0G
> Patchkit4,
>
> every morning around 04:50 /dev/null was changed from a system file to a
> standard normal file, obviously not correct. By a process of elimination
> it appears that the daily defragcron job was responsible (since I
> commented it out in the crontab the problem has not re-occured). however
> we also run a defragment by directly calling defragment once a week &
> this seems not to cause a problem.
>
> In the short term the problem has been resolved but I would like to
> re-enable the daily defrag if possible. Has anyone seen a similar problem ?
>
> Alaric Turner
-- Alaric Turner Systems Manager Albourne Partners Limited +44 (0)20 77209201
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