im not sure who to mail on this, so i figure best to start with a general mailing list for some pointers.
Basic problem, never happened to me before, on 2 of my systems, when attempting to access a symlink that points back to itself crashes the system. either a reboot(4/5 cases) or a lockup(1/5). I first encountered it today when trying to scp a directory tree to another system. caused a reboot on the system doing the scp'n. Then i rsync'd the same directory tree to another system and it worked fine. then i attempted another scp -r and it rebooted the system. so i tried it again, and it rebooted the system at the exact same point. i went to the console and did it again and it locked up hard. i scp'd it to another system and it rebooted again. eventually i traced it down to these particular 2 systems(i don't have many systems to crash to test). It hit me when i copied the directory tree to an ext2 partition(from reiserfs) and tried a scp -r and it worked fine. i noticed at the EXACT point where it crashed on reiserfs, the ext2 filesystem spit out a buncha "too many levels of symbolic links" or something. so i looked at the file and it was a simple symlink back to itself: blah -> blah i tried to do a ls -l bla<TAB FILENAME COMPLETION> system rebooted again. so i thought it was reiserfs. so i ssh'd to a machine at home and tried it, no crash, no errors. behaved as expected(same as ext2). so i thought maybe it was the 3ware raid driver(!), so i went to another system that has a raid1 array(opposed to raid10 on the affected systems) and it also uses reiserfs, and no problem. all of them are running virtually identical kernels, all are 2.2.19 with the same reiserfs patch 3.something. all machines are running potato. no other problems otherwise(been using the same kernels since june). the only differences are minor configuration changes depending on the hardware in the machine and it's purpose. im at a loss as to who i should attempt to contact to attempt to find a resolution to this problem. so i suppose my next test will be to re allocate the swap partition on the raid array as an ext2 filesystem and see if it locks up. has anyone ever heard of a controller driver possibly affecting filesystem access like this? oh, and there is no logs, the console showed nothing when i was at it(locked hard), and i have it logging to a remote syslog server, and it shows nothing. oh and as for why there is a looping symlink i don't know. i didn't create the directory tree, i was just trying to migrate it to another machine. nate