On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:42:06 Allan Duncan wrote:
> On 25/03/14 12:58, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:27:04PM +1100, Daniel Jitnah wrote:
> >> What can cause this?
> > 
> > most likely the VM's disk image became unavailable temporarily -
> > possibly due to network problems, or a server being rebooted.

Also corruption of storage and RAM are possibilities.  The cheaper cloud 
servers don't have ECC RAM, 
in the past I've had RAM corruption cause filesystem corruption.  I suspect 
that filesystems such as 
BTRFS and ZFS can get more messed up in the case of corrupt RAM than simpler 
filesystems like 
Ext*.

If the system was running for a while "working fine for weeks/months" then it 
could have been due 
for a FSCK on the next boot anyway in which case whatever errors there were 
might have been fixed 
already.

Also in these situations the kernel message log usually has good information 
about the problem but it 
can't be written to local disk.  So if you don't have syslog over the network 
to another machine then 
logging in via ssh and running "dmesg" is the only way to get the data.  So by 
rebooting you probably 
permanently lost the ability to determine the cause - unless it happens again.

> > assuming you are using ext2/3/4 on your VM's disk - the mount option
> > "errors=remount-ro" says to remount the fs as read-only if the kernel
> > has any errors accessing the filesystem (e.g. if a disk is dead/dying or
> > the cable is loose etc).
> > 
> > debian at least, and probably other distros, routinely adds
> > "errors=remount-ro" to /etc/fstab for ext filesystems when you build the
> > system.
> 
> If it is not set in fstab, look at the superblock with
>    tune2fs -l <device>
> and see what is set for "Errors behavior:"

Note that you probably don't want to change this.  Having the filesystem go 
read-only in case of 
problems is a good thing.  As you have read access you can login and run 
programs like dmesg to 
diagnose it and as you have no write access you don't get further corruption.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/

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