Over the festive break, we will be running a “salvage” across all our
AFS file servers. This salvage is like an “fsck” (for those familiar
with that) that checks the consistency of the filesystem.

It is estimated the salvaging will take 30 minutes to run per server,
but it does depend on the volume of data on the particular server.
During this time, the volumes (AFS file-space) on the server will be
inaccessible.

Apart from the temporary loss of access to the files, the only side
effect people may notice is the appearance of files or directories
named:

• “__ORPHANFILE__.index” for files.
• “__ORPHANDIR__.index” for directories.

These will be created if space is found to be allocated to a file (or
directory), but there is no reference to that space. These files (or
directories) will be created to point at that disconnected space.

If you find these files in your file-space, then you should check
their contents and rename them if you wish to keep them, or delete
them. Mostly they will be zero bytes, or empty directories.

This orphaned space can occur if servers or clients are unexpectedly
shutdown, eg during power cuts.

To minimise possible disruption, these salvage processes will be
scheduled to start a 2am on December 25th and 26th.

Neil
Services Unit

Festive AFS housekeeping / Computing Systems by is licensed under a