Re: exit status issue

[Dallas Clement]

>> + touch /mnt/array1/.accesstest
>> + CHK_RESULT=1
>
> It looks to me that touch is failing and reporting the failure and
> that bash is handling it correctly.
>
>> + touch /mnt/array1/.accesstest
>> + CHK_RESULT=0
>
> And then on a subsequent pass touch is reporting success.
>
> This doesn't (yet) look like a problem with bash.

Admittedly bash seems to do the right thing if you go by the set -x
execution trace.  If you go by that, it would indeed seem that the
call to touch is failing.  But the strace output tells a different
story.  According to it, the system calls that touch makes are
succeeding.  In fact, I created my own 'touch' and 'stat' programs,
both of which log any errors.  I never see any errors logged, so I'm
pretty sure they are getting executed which jives with what I'm seeing
in the strace output.

Is this a lower level scheduling problem?  It certainly could be.  I'm
testing on Linux 2.6.39.4.   I'll rollback to an older kernel, libc,
and libpthread and see if that makes any difference.

>
>> The purpose of this function is simply to try and create or modify a
>> test file on a RAID share.  It's just a periodic integrity check.
>
> If I ever had even one single failure on a raid filesystem I would
> start replacing hardware.  I wouldn't be trying to retry.  I wouldn't
> be trying to umount and mount it again.  ANY failures would mean
> something so severely broken that I would consider the system unusable
> until repaired.

Yep, I agree - these sort of failures should not happen unless there
is something terribly wrong.

>
> On the other hand, do you really mean an NFS mounted filesystem?
> Perhaps using the nfs automounter?  If so then say so.  Don't say
> "share" which implies a MS Windows SMB / CIFS network mount.  The NFS
> client subsystem is notoriously bad.  The nfs automounter is worse.  I
> am guessing you probably really mean that you are using an nfs mounted
> filesystem using the automounter.  Pretty much everyone in that
> situation has tried to recover from problems with it at one time or
> another.

Not doing anything with NFS mounting thankfully.  It's a RAID array on
a NAS device which is typically used for SMB / CIFS network mount.