Hi all,

I am seeing some files have garbage contents when they're copied.  The
system is i386/1.4_ALPHA (yeah, upgrade now scheduled) and the files
are on a local FFS filesystem.

The files are all small -- they're mail messages being stored into a
qmail Maildir, and then copied out at a later time.  The process doing
this copying is a perl script that has been stable for a year or so,
and it checks all writes for errors.  No errors reported.

I can match the garbage files to an original that has the same length
and is correctly readable.  (I've added logging so that pathnames will
be recorded too, just in case.)

I have also had the machine lock up once.  This might have gone to DDB
-- DDB wasn't supposed to be in the kernel, but I've just checked the
config file and it is. :-(

The hardware is a Pentium 100 using a NCR 53c810 SCSI controller and a
Segate ST15230N disk.  This system has been stable for a year or so in
this configuration.

There are no post-boot messages in demsg, and nothing useful in
/var/log/messages.

I am planning to:

(a) upgrade to 1.4 (or 1.4.1)
(b) compile a kernel without DDB
(c) increase my backup frequency (;-)
(d) run lots of 'make world' and see what happens

Can anyone shed any light on this, or offer any further suggestions?

Thanks,

Giles