Informix 9.21 symbolic link problem

Posted in 2005

Wayne Houseknecht — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:09:32 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

I'm running Informix 9.21UC5XF on an AIX 4.3.3 machine. All of the chunks for the instance are referenced indirectly through symbolic links. While doing some system & database maintenance, I took the engine off-line, then brought it up to quiescent, down again, and then tried to bring it up again. It failed with a bad root chunk error. After some digging, I discovered that all of my symbolic links had been deleted! I managed to reproduce this problem without meaning to a few hours later. Up, down, try to come up, the links are gone. Both times I had to restore them from a mksysb backup, as the links were in /dev. Has anyone ever seen any behavior like this before, under any instance or configuration?