The Inode-Eating Bug

[Scott Hazen Mueller]

Chalk up YA site being bitten by the System 5 lost inode bug.  My vendor
doesn't do Unix anymore (that I know of), and it's not a terribly standard
system, so I have little hope of seeing the bug fixed.  Since it is of
course hitting my news spool filesystem hardest, I would like to mitigate
the effects by hacking [ir]news to spool the entire batch on a low inodes
condition.  The necessary code changes were entirely trivial; however, I
have no idea of whether they are really meaningful.  Does anybody know how
the out-of-inodes condition progresses?  that is, does a stricken system
decay steadily from the "real" inode count down toward 0 or 1, or do things
look normal until blammo! ifree is (<100|=1) or whatever?  Perhaps a periodic
repost of one of the analyses of the problem would be useful.
-- 
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