[OpenAFS] volume corruption: directory references disappear!?!

[J. Maynard Gelinas]

  Here's a strange one:

  A few users' volume home directory contents have simply disappeared over
the weekend. And it's not like they delted everything with an rm -rf *
because even . and .. are gone:

csraid1:/afs/lns.mit.edu/user/bldg-44/schol# ls -al
total 0
csraid1:/afs/lns.mit.edu/user/bldg-44/schol#

  Fortunately, the clone volume is populated with the volume's contents:

csraid1:/afs/lns.mit.edu/user/bldg-44/schol# fs examine clone
Volume status for vid = 536871056 named user.bldg-44.schol.backup
Current disk quota is 500000
Current blocks used are 432590
The partition has 39751884 blocks available out of 47842644

csraid1:/afs/lns.mit.edu/user/bldg-44# ls clone
020120Tentative A G E N D A.doc
102004.16.gif

full directory listing[...]

I also have AFS dumps of the affected volume(s), so I'm not worried about
data loss. However, I do find this completely strange. It's not only this
user who is affected, but a few others as well. Has anyone ever seen
anything like this? vos backupsys and then a backup dump operation was
last performed Friday evening, so I know the contents were good as of at
least then.

Running Debian 3.0 with kernel 2.4.17 and openafs-1.2.3.

Thanks,
--Maynard