Errors during expire

[Joe St Sauver]

>We've a transit box which persists in panicing every few days (the
>vendor believes hardware...), but every time we end up having to fix
>the history file as it ends up with truncated lines or a spurious
>Hole, or...

I'm actually seeing pretty bizarre crap getting written to history, e.g.,
doing:

perl -ne 'print "$.: $_" if length ($_) > 200' history

on a box that recently developed history related problems showed a variety
of lines that contained non-printable characters (copy of 21 such entries 
available off the list on request if you're interested, not included here
due to the non-printable nature of the lines); undoubtably there are other
bad (shorter) lines also in there. The presence of those spurious lines
makes me think that some buffer is getting stepped on, maybe? 

On a completely different note, and on a different Linux box, I would also 
note that tradover is apparently exercising an interesting bug in the vfs 
layer generating errors such as:

filemap.c:2084: bad pmd 1c0001e3.
filemap.c:2084: bad pmd 1c0001e3.
filemap.c:2084: bad pmd 2dc001e3.
filemap.c:2084: bad pmd 2dc001e3.

If anyone else is seeing that sort of thing and has found a solution for it,
I'd be interested in hearing from you.

Regards,

Joe