Daily Flash problems

[Bill Rowan]

I have a fairly large deployment of Cisco routers that I use RANCID to track daily diffs.  The problem I have is that RANCID will tell me random routers have no flash one day and then the next day all the flash contents will be back again.  I am running RANCID on 71 ubr7246's and 17 120xx GSRs.  I am not sure if the problem is happening on the GSRs.  I have looked through about a month's worth of data and all I see is the problem occuring on the uBRs.  Here is a sample of what I am talking about:

- !Flash: No files on device
+ !Flash: -#- ED --type-- --crc--- -seek-- nlen -length- -----date/time------ name
+ !Flash: 1   .. image    CCD17FFF  66F690   29  6616592 Mar 06 2001 21:14:54 ubr7200-k1ps-mz.120-14.SC.bin
+ !Flash: 2   .. image    C233DAB0  F752A8   30  9460632 Dec 08 2001 17:21:45 ubr7200-ik1s-mz.121-9.5.EC.bin
+ !Flash: 3   .. config   EF397E63  F791AC   14    16003 May 20 2002 01:14:11 running-config


This is from last night's diffs and obviously the files have been there all along by the time stamp shown.  To verify this, I look at the previous day's diff and see where this router shows:

- !Flash: -#- ED --type-- --crc--- -seek-- nlen -length- -----date/time------ name
- !Flash: 1   .. image    CCD17FFF  66F690   29  6616592 Mar 06 2001 21:14:54 ubr7200-k1ps-mz.120-14.SC.bin
- !Flash: 2   .. image    C233DAB0  F752A8   30  9460632 Dec 08 2001 17:21:45 ubr7200-ik1s-mz.121-9.5.EC.bin
- !Flash: 3   .. config   EF397E63  F791AC   14    16003 May 20 2002 01:14:11 running-config
+ !Flash: No files on device

Like I said, there is no regular pattern to which routers get affected and it doesn't happen to all of them at once.  Some nights 10 to 15 routers will show this and others only 3 or 4.  Ever since I have ran RANCID, I have seen this.  Only now have I decided to complain.  :-)

Ultimately, I guess I could take out the flash check in RANCID, but I really like it because it helps me catch core dumps and line card crash files.  However, if nothing can be done to fix this, I would like to know how to take that out of my diffs.