I’ve had issues with all my sites lately including this one that have seemed “strange”. Well I know what’s happening now, but not why. For some reason, it has become nearly impossible to create a file or a directory with a purely numeric name. Using touch, mkdir, or even a C program to call open or SYS_open fails (errno==2) if the file name has nothing but numbers in it. Any file name that has at least one character that isn’t a number works like you’d expect. This happens on all file systems.

I’ve upgraded the kernel. The fact that it occurs on all file systems and even when directly calling the kernel makes me think it is not the C library or a corrupt file system. There are no loaded modules in the kernel (ext3 built in along with everything else needed).

Here’s a twist. The debugfs program can create directories with numeric names. I assume it is doing some direct manipulation to accomplish this — more evidence it isn’t a file system issue.

Not sure what to do next. My colocators want to wipe my hard drive and reinstall Linux (must be Microsoft trained) but I’ve told them no — I’d figure something out eventually.