Comment 57 for bug 317781

I've seen this happen twice now, both times in the ext4 filesystem beneath my encrypted home directory using ecryptfs.

Tyler Hicks and I spent about 4 or 5 hours trying to track down the bug in ecryptfs.

In my dmesg, I was seeing the following (recording here in case other ecryptfs users experience the same problem):

    Valid eCryptfs headers not found in file header region or xattr region

The file was an ecryptfs file, with an encrypted filename. However, there is no such thing as 0-byte files in ecryptfs. Even empty files are padded and encrypted. When ecryptfs encounters (tries to read or write) an empty file, it cannot find any valid headers (as the dmesg says), which means that it can't decode the fek with the fnek, and <barf>.

I was able to track these files down in the underlying encrypted directory, and clean them out with the following:

 $ umount.ecryptfs_private
 $ cd $HOME/.Private
 $ mount.ecryptfs_private
 $ find . -size 0c | xargs -i rm -f {}

I'm going to mark this bug as "affecting" ecryptfs-utils, but mark it "invalid", such that search results for users with the same problem might find themselves here.

Ted, thanks for the detailed explanations.

:-Dustin