[tech] Problems observed on mussel

[James Devenish]

Just a couple of small points that don't bother me but may indicate
trouble:

Filesystem
==========
While deleting directories containing thousands of files (but no nested
directories) on /home the following was observed:

mussel( 8:16AM)~/webcam/archives% rm -r 2001-06-06-Wed 2001-06-07-Thu 2001-06-08-Fri
rm: cannot remove `2001-06-06-Wed/webcam.jpg.204': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `2001-06-07-Thu/webcam.jpg.212': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `2001-06-08-Fri/webcam.jpg.212': No such file or directory

Prior to this I had transferred the contents of those three directories
(successfully, AFAICT) off morwong to the outside world for storage. I
don't know the algorithm for rm nor the precise way that NFS does(n't)
work so I am wondering whether the above errors are "normal" or not.
Usually I do the whole process on morwong and I've never encountered
errors such as these.

Emailed Output from Cron
========================
My other problem is that cron on mussel does seem to run cron jobs (in
the past it has been flaky) but it doesn't email the output to me (I
know there is output) any more. It used to. The last email I got from my
daily cron job was on 7th June. The job appears to finish successfully
but of course without the output I can't tell if there are errors along
the way. I an sending this email from mussel, so clearly mussel still
has some capacity to send email from my account. I know there can
delivery delays when /home fills up, but this "missing email" problem
doesn't seem to coincide with that.