Filesystems acting as read-only

Can anyone think of a reason why a system would start reporting that its file systems are read-only?

This is a remote system, and because it is involved in some traffic routing (which is still working perfectly), I can't easily reboot it at the moment, in case it does not restart smoothly.

Whenever I try to write to any file system, such as "touch /tmp/a", I get an error "touch: cannot `a': Read-only file system". (The exception is the tmpfs file system on /dev/shm, which works fine.)

Commands (such as lsof) which involve writing temporary files are failing with "Input/output error", which is perhaps not surprising if they are also unable to write files.

"df" shows plenty of free space on all filesystems, "free" shows lots of memory. "mount" shows the filesystems mounted read/write.

One other thing that had happened was that there were thousands of "nmbd" processes (part of samba). I cleared them up - I had to "kill -9" them. I am wondering if there had been some runaway effect that had led to these processes being spawned, and using up all of some resource - despite having killed them afterwards.

Plenty of things are still working fine - I have no problem accessing it with ssh, and the openvpn tunnels on it are still up.


If anyone has any thoughts or ideas of what could have happened, I would love to know. Otherwise I am going to have to wait until I get a chance to reset the machine safely.

mvh.,

David
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