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Indeed. My story from 1999.

Worked at a company that bought a ton of NetApp filers to support a webmail service. NetApp sales engineers swear on their mothers' graves that there is no such thing as fsck for wafl, that wafl always transitions from one gold-plated consistent state to the next with no possibility of metadata inconsistency. OK.

Three months later, big outage. On-site techs report the filers display "fast wack" on the front panel. Call NetApp support. What is "fast wack"? That's the fsck. Assholes!

It turned out that the filer had got corrupt somehow, and wack itself could not comprehend a filesystem with more than 2 billion files. Inode number stored in signed int32. Major, major surgery, hotpatching of filer firmware, three days of downtime, serious negative press coverage.

Bottom line: whenever anyone tells you their filesystem is guaranteed to be consistent, kick that person right in the shins.




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