SVN Error "write-lock stolen" may mean FS corruption

[Joseph Lunderville <jl...@hadensoftware.com>]

Posting this for the benefit of anyone googling for this error message.

I use Subversion as part of a (crufty, crufty) automatic versioned 
backup, and recently I've been seeing these messages from the backup 
cron job:

svn: Working copy 'email/jlunder/cur' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
svn: Working copy '/backup/wc/email/jlunder/.expressus/tmp' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)

So I tried to run "svn cleanup", and got this:

atarax:/backup/wc# svn cleanup
svn: Write-lock stolen in 'email/jlunder/.expressus/tmp'

Which is pretty disappointing.

So anyway, after some investigation, I decided to do an fsck, just in 
case (I mean, I'm using journalled ext3 on a mirrored disk array, how 
much can go wrong? Right? Ha ha ha...):

atarax:~# e2fsck -f /dev/md2
e2fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Entry 'lock' in /wc/email/jlunder/.bcit/tmp/.svn (4079622) has an 
incorrect filetype (was 1, should be 2).
Fix<y>? yes

Entry 'lock' in /wc/email/jlunder/.bcit/tmp/.svn (4079622) is a link to 
directory /wc/email/jlunder/.ryan/.svn/tmp/props (4079629).
Clear<y>? yes

[etc...]

I eventually had to blow away the working copy entirely, because e2fsck 
didn't actually leave the filesystem in a usable state (!).

The moral of this story? Subversion is more trustworthy than ext3? Or 
maybe more trustworthy than my hard disks. Either way it's a somewhat 
scary thought.

-- 
Joseph Lunderville, Software Developer
Haden Software Inc.
604-693-2323

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