Weird Linux Problem

After a reboot, I was trying to save a file to a subdirectory of my $HOME directory, and getting an error that it was a read-only drive. When I look at permissions, I’m seeing something like this:

drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 May 29 2013 Alaska
drwxrwxr-x. 5 simberg simberg 4096 Apr 26 2012 Blog
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 CA_Enterprise_Zones
drwxrwxr-x. 7 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Conservative_Space
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Aug 9 2012 Depots
drwxr-x—. 6 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 21 14:49 Interglobal
drwxrwxr-x. 3 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 3 2010 LaunchSpace
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Nov 5 2012 LEO_Adventure
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Liberty

I’ve never seen that dot after the permissions before, and it seems to be an ACL-related thing. Does anyone know how this happened, and how to undo it?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Also, could this be related to an inability to print? It thinks it’s sending something to the printer (which it sees), but it never actually happens.

[Update a while later]

Well, whatever the problem was, a reboot fixed it, as well as the printing problem.

3 thoughts on “Weird Linux Problem”

  1. Welcome to the world of SELinux. The dot’s been there for awhile, and ‘ls’ shows it to signify that SELinux is controlling those files. It’s hard to debug remotely – it might be safe (enough) in your environment to disable SELinux, but I’d discourage that – as that’s probably not the issue.

    It’s quite (more?) likely that your filesystem had been marked read-only – a SCSI issue can cause this. The ‘mount’ command jsut prints the contents of /etcmtab, which may be wrong if the filesystem has been remounted read-only. ‘cat /proc/mounts’ is uptodate. You may find something in your /var/log/messages (or syslog) that shows the remount.

    If that’s the issue, you’ll likely need to reboot single-user and correct the filesystem with fsck.

  2. I have no /var/log.

    When I look at dmesg, I see many of these: [75311.007042] systemd-journald[424]: Failed to write entry (22 items, 641 bytes), ignoring: Read-only file system

  3. Definitely sounds like the OS mounted the disk read-only, but I’ve no idea what would cause it to do that other than an uncorrectable disk error when mounting read-write.

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