268 The File System
Date: Wed, 29 May 91 00:42:20 EDT
From: [email protected] (Curtis Fennell)^3
Subject: Mixed up mail
To: [email protected]Life^4 had, what appears to be, hardware problems that caused a number
of users’ mailboxes to be misassigned. At first it seemed that the owner-
ship of a subset of the mailboxes had been changed, but it later became
clear that, for the most part, the ownership was correct but the name of
the file was wrong.For example, the following problem occurred:-rw------- 1 bmh user 9873 May 28 18:03 kchangbut the contents of the file ‘named’ kchang was really that of the user
bmh. Unfortunately, the problem was not entirely consistent and
there were some files that did not appear to be associated with the
owner or the filename. I have straightened this out as best I could and
reassigned ownerships. (A number of people have complained about
the fact that they could not seem to read their mailboxes. This should
be fixed). Note that I associated ownerships by using the file owner-
ships and grep'ing for the “TO:” header line for confirmation; I did
not grovel through the contents of private mailboxes.Please take a moment to attempt to check your mailbox.I was unable to assign a file named ‘sam.’ It ought to have belonged
to sae but I think I have correctly associated the real mailbox with
that user. I left the file in /com/mail/strange-sam. The user receives
mail sent to bizzi, motor-control, cbip-meet, whitaker-users, etc.Soon after starting to work on this problem, Life crashed and the par-
tition containing /com/mail failed the file-system check. Several
mailboxes were deleted while attempting to reboot. Jonathan has a
list of the deleted files. Please talk to him if you lost data.Please feel free to talk to me if you wish clarification on this prob-
lem. Below I include a list of the 60 users whose mailboxes are most
likely to be at risk.(^3) Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by Gail Zacharias
(^4) “Life” is the host name of the NFS and mail server at the MIT AI Laboratory.