[vox-tech] gzip bug?

[Kevin Dawson]

Dear Mike,
Thank you for the great suggestions. I followed all your advice and put
the result after your points.

-----Original Message-----
From: vox-tech-admin@lists.lugod.org
[mailto:vox-tech-admin@lists.lugod.org] On Behalf Of
msimons@moria.simons-clan.com
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 6:51 PM
To: vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] gzip bug?

Kevin,

  From reading the other material in this tread nothing really
jumps out... but if you gzip and gunzip a file on the same machine
without transferring it and it doesn't work, something is seriously
wrong with that machine, the kernel, the filesystem, or the application.

  But nothing obvious stands out, so here are some possibilities...

- Can you try doing a fsck on the machine?
  (shutdown -F -r now) reboot the machine and cause a check...

Sure, I did that.

- You say you are using a "VFS" filesystem... which I think stands for
  "Virtual File System"... which is just the API layer between the=20
  kernel and the actual filesystem drivers.  Could you try to report
  which filesystem is really in use via the following...
    send a copy of "cat /proc/mounts" and cd into where you are=20
  working with the files and run "dk -k ."...

/proc/mounts lists:
/dev/hda6 /home ext2 rw 0 0
for the /home mount where the corrupted files are.
What does dk do? I don't have it on this machine. May be because it
doesn=92t have any SCSI drives?

- Can you run md5sum `which gzip` `which gunzip`?
  Perhaps someone running your version of Redhat can verify your
  executables are not corrupted.

Ocae 9777 548d 5dcb 6179 5599 6f51 3525

- When you say Winzip opens it without problem, did you check the=20
  tail end of the file for completeness?
  (it's possible that Winzip also found the file corrupted but didn't
   say anything).

These are binary files, Matlab matrices, and Matlab happily takes them
after Winzip opened them.

- How long have you been using that system?

For only 2 months.

- Noticed any other applications crash or behave oddly?

I used the machine mostly for data crunching with Perl and Matlab. The
longest uninterrupted computation took about 48 hours and everything
worked as expected. In the past 2 months, I didn't see anything unusual.
Although, I'm not sure what usual is since it is a new system. There
were some problems with importing really large tab-delimited matrices
into Matlab. I had to restart Matlab then it took the matrix.

- Is the CPU overclocked?

I hope not. How can I check it?

In response to a previos post I'm doing multiple runs of memtest.
Everything looks fine so far.

    TTFN,
      Mike

Thank you again,

Kevin