Re: Corrupt file?? - followup

So apparently it is the nature of this user-mountable filesystem that it
is inaccessible to any other user, including root. (I believe gvfs is
the replacement for gnome-fs, and IMHO, too "fresh" for what is supposed
to be a stable, longterm release).

fsck doesn't find anything wrong with .gvfs, and after a reboot, .gvfs
always appears normal. Running rsnapshot (or rsync) generates an error
because it can't access the file in any way. That file appears all goofy
when viewed as root with ls in bash, like in my example. But if you
access it as the user in bash or Nautilus, it all looks fine, even the
.gvfs mount point. I was running rsync as root, and hence the problem.

This is counter-intuitive to me. I expect permission/access errors when
working as a user, and NONE when working as root. I didn't even test for
the opposite scenario.

The easy solution: add --exclude /home/username/.gvfs to the rsync command.
Online forums are abuzz with discussions about what parts of this are
bugs and which are features.

The ubuntu system in question in supposed to run as a server. But I also
installed ubuntu-desktop, to make some of the simpler admin tasks easier
for an onsite person to do. This whole problem could be avoided by
simply not having ubuntu-desktop installed (I suppose a non-gnome
desktop might also be a solution).

Thanks for your help. Maybe this can save someone else some time down
the road.
        Les...

cwillu wrote:
> .gvfs should be a directory, used as a mount-point for shares accessed
> via nautilus to allow non gnome application to access them (which will
> only happen if gvfs-fuse is installed). It should be safe to just
> delete that folder and recreate it (nothing is stored in it).
>
> As for actually why it happened in the first place, what filesystem
> are you using on that drive?
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Chris Friesen <cbf123@mail.usask.ca> wrote:
>> Les Klassen Hamm wrote:
>>
>>> A directory listing shows the following snippet (a line above and below
>>> included for context):
>>>
>>> -rw-r--r-- 1 leskh leskh 108 2008-06-20 14:55 .gtk-bookmarks
>>> d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs
>>> -rw------- 1 leskh leskh 519 2008-06-24 16:20 .ICEauthority
>>>
>>> Can anyone tell me something about that? This is on a fresh install of
>>> Ubuntu 8.04
>>> It doesn't seem to be doing any damage, except for the error message
>>> during backup, but it looks wrong, even potentially troublesome.
>> I'd be suspicious of a corrupt file/inode/directory. Is there an fsck for
>> the filesystem, or some other way to validate/fix it?
>>
>> If you wanted to get really hardcore you could read the raw inodes on disk
>> and parse it manually...
>>
>> Chris
>>
Received on Wed Jun 25 10:51:19 2008