Chris Kline reported a problem in early January where a file which had too few replicated blocks did not get replicated until a DFS restart.
I just saw a similar issue. I had a file that had a block with 1 replica (2 required) that did not get replicated. I changed the number of required replicates, but nothing caused any action. Changing the number of required replicas on other files got them to be replicated. I eventually copied the file to temp, deleted the original and moved the copy back to the original place. I was also able to read the entire file which shows that the problem was not due to slow reporting from a down datanode. This happened just after I had a node failure which was why I was messing with replication at all. Since I was in the process of increasing the replication on nearly 10,000 large files, my log files are full of other stuff, but I am pretty sure that there is a bug here. This was on a relatively small cluster with 13 data nodes. It also brings up a related issue that has come up before in that there are times when you may want to increase the number of replicas of a file right NOW. I don't know of any way to force this replication. Is there such a way?
