[LUNI] Truely Bizarre

[Joe Digilio]

This is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen and I'm at a complete
loss for an explanation...

On Saturday I'm at work and I start running a script that would take most of
the night to run. I verify it's running and leave.  The script simply converts
an image from one format to another. Nothing too fancy.

Sunday morning at about 2:07am, an rsync script is run which backs everything
up (OS, home dirs, data drives, etc) to a remote server.

Fast forward to today (Tuesday) at about 3:40pm... I notice in my logs that
rsync did not transfer any of my newly created images from Sunday or Monday
(ie, the backups on Mon and Tues morning ran without error, but didn't transfer
any new images).  I switch to the virtual desktop window (or workspace as icewm
calls them) with the xterm running my image conversion script.  Text is happily
scrolling up the xterm window.  But on closer inspection, no files were created
from 1:18am Sunday morning until approximately the time I switched to the
virtual window with the script running!!! No files. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. I
can verify this also by the typescript log of the session (my scripts runs a
program which prints the date and time it ran at).

Now it seems to be working fine again! And I did nothing, other than switching
the virtual desktop!  In fact, it's now just after 5pm and the script is done.
Everything is converted!

You can understand why I'm completely dumbfounded.

Does anyone have *any* ideas whatsoever???

And to answer your first question, no the script does not take 3 days to
convert a single image. It takes about 10-15 seconds.  I reconverted the image
it "paused" at and it took <10 seconds.  Besides, the timing of the next newly
converted image is waaay to coincidental with when I switched virtual desktops.

Thanks,
Joe

"An eye for an eye soon makes the whole world blind."
   --Mahatma Gandhi