[Dirvish] dirvish-expire loses on 'summary' directory

[Paul Slootman]

On Sat 27 Jan 2007, Barton C Massey wrote:

> The BUGS section of the dirvish-expire manpage says:
> "Dirvish-expire will walk the file hierarchy of all banks or
> the specified vault looking for summary files. Anything
> non-dirvish in there may cause excess file-walking." And
> it's right. I just got bit hard because the lost+found on my
> disk happened to contain "#12371245/career/summary" and it
> was a directory.

Any lost+found directory should be empty except for a brief period after
a crash where the fsck necessarily had to move things there. Immediately
after the fsck (and certainly before using the filesystem in question
for production!) the contents of the lost+found directory should be
inspected and moved to appropriate places. That's nothing to do with
dirvish, but with good system administration...

> Update: it's worse than I thought. The thing does a full
> find, so a directory named "summary" almost anywhere in the
> vault will lose---moving the contents of lost+found to a

Do you mean vault or bank here?

A bank should contain just dirvish backups, and not also be a general
purpose storage location.  If you don't want to dedicate a whole
filesystem to dirvish, at least create a subdirectory on the fileystem
and use that as the bank. I do that anyway on dedicated filesystems...

A vault must certainly never contain anything besides what dirvish
writes there, besides the obvious config file.

> but this is obviously 'orrible. In particular, never name a
> vault 'tree', or it will never be expired.

That _is_ a good point :-)

> A real fix, please? It doesn't look hard to do the right
> thing, i.e. only work with the vaults as defined in the
> config file, but I'm not a great Perl programmer and haven't

Actually, I find it very useful that dirvish-expire traverses 
vaults inside a bank whether they're listed in the config file or not
(I suppose you mean the master.conf config file?). That way, if a system
is removed from the dirvish config (because it doesn't exist anymore or
whatever) all the images are slowly expired as per usual until one last
one remains; then I get a cron email about that and I can decide to
remove it altogether or to archive it.


Paul Slootman