4294967294

Alright, by far the most amusing thing I've seen recently.

r00723r0 comes into #gentoo-amd64 complaining about his init scripts failing to start due to "too many links" in /var/lib/init.d.

Now, here's the fun and how people neglect the most basic of things..

So me and some other people in the channel take him on a tour that included re-emerging of baselayout, editing config files properly (especially /etc/conf.d/rc), checking the system clock, making his bash handle some pipelines.. ("find / -print 2>/dev/null | xargs ls -ld | tr -s ' ' | sort -t ' '+1 | head -n 50 | less" courtsey of codermattie) and a few reboots. Nothing works. We even wondered about a misconfigured kernel. But nope.

So then comes the most basic of things that was needed to be done. A simple ls -lR into /var/lib revealed this gem...

drwxr-xr-x 4294967294 root root 4096 Aug 15 06:26 init.d

And here's the response it got in the channel..

[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:46:36] [r00723r0] i'm pretty sure it's my kernel
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:46:43] [floyd_n_milan] look at that link count on /var/lib/init.d!
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:46:49] [floyd_n_milan> drwxr-xr-x 4294967294 root root 4096 Aug 15 06:26 init.d
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:46:54] [r00723r0] wtf???
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:00] [r00723r0] how do i fix it
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:07] [codermattie] holy poo !
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:10] [codermattie] that's it !
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:15] [floyd_n_milan] yeah LOL
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:17] [r00723r0] wow
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:19] [r00723r0] lol
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:24] [r00723r0] owned
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:30] [codermattie] man, that's the freakin 32 bit limit !
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:35] [r00723r0] haha
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:47:38] [r00723r0] oops?

Right. So the simple solution was to boot from a livecd and do an fsck.jfs on that filesystem...

[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:59:21] [r00723r0] AHHH
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:59:30] [r00723r0] incorrect link counts have been detected
[Tue Aug 15 2006] [15:59:35] [r00723r0] will correct

Yes!

So from now on, please remember to do the simple and the most basic things first :P Oh yeah, and always, always, be very very careful with etc-update!!! ;)

I must say though that, the origins of that 4294967294 are definitely worth exploring. :D



P.S. Here's the comment r00723r0 left on the original livejournal entry:

The origin is from me rebooting (obviously during fsck) because I forgot to compile in framebuffer support.

Nice post, might be my home page for a while :P