Re: [2.5.69] ext3 error: rec_len %% 4 != 0

[Andrew Morton]

Florian Weimer <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Sometimes, our 2.5 test machine (actually, it's a production machine,
> please don't ask why we can't use 2.4 *sigh*) stops with an ext3 error
> message.  We have now activated proper logging, and that's what we
> got:
> 
> May 28 03:23:00 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device md0): ext3_readdir: bad entry in directory #16056745: rec_len %% 4 != 0 - offset=52, inode=431743, rec_len=37017, name_len=41 

Are you using htree?  Run

	dumpe2fs -h /dev/hda1 | grep features

and if it says "dir_index" then try turning it off:

	tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hda1

and reboot.

If it is not an htree problem (and htree seems pretty stable now) then
possibly the IO system has lost some data.  If possible, try using a normal
old disk (no RAID).

Falling back to ext2 for a while would be interesting.