root has no access to file

[ken_yap]

Originally Posted by stefaug

Some files on a customer's Suse box are now not accesible - not even by root. Other files in the same directory are accesssible. It is an long existing box and has been running fine till this morning. There are no prying fingers and nobody but me has root access:

# ls ADSO33*
ls: ADSO33.DAT: Permission denied
ls: ADSO33.KEY: Permission denied

# sudo ls ADSO33*
ls: ADSO33.DAT: Permission denied
ls: ADSO33.KEY: Permission denied

# chmod 777 ADSO33.DAT
chmod: failed to get attributes of `ADSO33.DAT': Permission denied

I am baffled - I have NEVER seen that root cannot access a file.

Since the * generated two arguments, read access to the directory appears to be ok.

Since you say it's a local filesystem, we can discount NFS issues. The bad news is that the last time I saw this kind of behaviour with reiserfs there was filesystem damage and a fsck was needed. Have a look in /var/log/messages to see if there are any messages about disk read errors.

You may need to take the system down and do a reiserfsck. I also hope you have backups of the files.

On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:10:49 GMT, brassy
<brassy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>> Just how many files do you have in the directory where this file
>> resides?
>
>answered in earlier post: "There are close to a thousand of them in
>this directory"
>
>proceed with your madness, please (is there a max number of files in
>any one directory which can be accessed?)

I have found that various file systems get crabby or slow at anywhere
from a few hundred files to a few hundred thousand file in any one
directory. It depends a lot on the particular file system. For the
particular file system in question, testing may be a useful approach,
ReiserFS put a "really, really bad taste in my mouth" early on; thus i
no longer use it.