[Metakit] Investigating a corrupt metakit file.

[Steve Landers]

On 09/06/2005, at 5:48 PM, Pat Thoyts wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> I appear to have a corrupted metakit file and I'm trying to
> work out how it might have occured. I can read data from the file but
> some of the properties now contain incorrect values.
...
> The metakit file was created using Windows XP on a local hard drive  
> but has almost
> certainly been modified over an SMB mount. I believe the server was
> Windows 2003 server (but it may have been NT 4 -- they upgraded fairly
> recently).
...
> I would like to know if anyone has seen something similar or has any
> idea how this might be reproduced. If this is a metakit over SMB issue
> it would be good to confirm this. If it's a more general metakit on
> windows issue then I need to work out a fix.

I've seen similar in the last few days. Customer running an  
application that uses mk4tcl and oomk (this in itself might be a  
problem ... but read on).

Works perfectly when on a local disk, there seems to be corruption  
occasionally occur when on a volume shared from a file server  
appliance (not sure of the brand, but told it runs Windows Server 2000).

I can't pin down the sequence of events that leads to the corruption  
- but one data point is that the customer started the application,  
exited and then re-entered. Interestingly, the file server thought  
the metakit file was locked, even though the machine that had it open  
was rebooted.

Not much to go on, but I'm wondering if there is a problem with SMB  
configuration - perhaps overly aggressive caching?

In summary, I've got question marks re metakit over SMB (at least  
until we narrow down what is going on) and so have instructed the  
customers to run off a local database file for now.

Hope this helps

Steve


--
Steve Landers                     Software Design Solutions
Digital Smarties                  steve at DigitalSmarties.com
Perth, Western Australia          DigitalSmarties.com