[ILUG] puzzle of the day: RHEL has files seemingly undoing edits

[Keith Halligan]

Hi Brendan,

On 12/02/2008, Brendan Kehoe <brendan at zen.org> wrote:
> Have any of you ever heard of this?  Sent by someone I work with who's
> got very sporadic email access, so I'm probably just going to call him
> on the phone once I can come up with (or find) any theories on what
> could be doing this.  As far as I know it's not under anything like CVS
> or SVN.
>
>     I'm running red hat linux. Several times the PC powered down
>     unexpectedly due to power outs.....this could be the source of my
>     problems...
>
>     Anyway, I'm seeing files which I edit and change regressing back,
>     all by themselves to previous versions of the file.
>     Thus I edit the file, save, close, and do anything (md5sum, copy,
>     wc, whatever) with the file, and it works fine.
>     Then I come back in 20 minutes, and again try to use the file (run
>     md5sum, whatever) and it fails,
>     I check why and the file I had just updated is back to its original
>     file!!
>
>     My solution is to make the file read only (chmod 444) after I close
>     it, and then it is not written over with the old version.  I would
>     have closed all editors etc.
>
>     During powerup the system did file file system corruption problems
>     and ran fsck and e2fsck which did (seemingly) find and fix issues.
>

Sounds a bit strange alright,

Have you looked through the system logs for the twenty minutes between
the time your file has been saved and overwrote with the old version?

Is it generally the same group of text files on the filesystem, or
does it happen with any file anywhere on the system?  For example if
you created a text file with some random data in your home area would
you get the same results?

Regards,
Keith