Re: forced fsck (again?)

[Andreas Dilger <adilger sun com>]

On Jan 22, 2008  14:34 -0800, Valerie Henson wrote:
> I'm not sure what the best solution is - print warnings for several
> days/mounts before the force fsck? print warnings but don't force
> fsck? increase the default days/mounts before force fsck?

I believe current e2fsprogs already prints the number of mounts remaining
before e2fsck is forced, though this doesn't help for time-based checks
with a long system uptime.

Conversely, I think for users that have set "-c 0 -i 0" e2fsck should
print a message like "fs mounted 50 times, last e2fsck was 200 days ago"
or similar, if the default limits are exceeded to alert the user that
this might be an issue.

> base force fsck intervals on write activity?

I had submitted a patch ages ago that considered "clean" unmounts
less dangerous than "crash" and only incremented the mount count
about 1/5 times in that case (randomly).

> Disks do rot, and file systems do get corrupted, and fsck should be
> run periodically, but the current system of frequent unpredictable
> forced fsck at boot is probably not the best cost/benefit tradeoff for
> many use cases.

Maybe some of the distro folks (Eric? :-) will pick up on this thread and
consider adding the "e2fsck snapshot" script to cron.monthly or similar.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.