RFE: autofsck

[Paul Wouters]

> For the same reason that Ted T'so doesn't think the software itself
> should blindly assume -y as the default.  ;)  You are basically asking
> the Fedora scripts to override the e2fsck defaults chosen by Ted as the
> safest approach.

Who, aside from Ted Tso, can do anything else but re-run with "yes"? You
are just postponing the problem, and thereby adding to the problem.

> If nothing else, forcing the user to press "y" at least alerts them that
> something  has gone wrong.

We already know something is wrong, our box is missing waiting in single
user mode.

>  An unattended box rebooting post-disaster,
> running e2fsck -y may move huge swaths of data to lost+found
> automatically and leave the user scratching their heads about where on
> earth all their email went (or whatever).

As compared to rebooting post-disaster, being gone, needing the sysadmin
to drive over, find single user mode, run e2fsck, get INCONSISTENT
FILESYSTEM detected, and rerun with e2fsck -y, which puts all files in
lost+found.

How different your scenario from having "-y" or not? Nothing.

However, on the OTHER 99.99% of the scnearios, your box is dead in the
water and boxes with -y are back online. I'd rather scratch my head on
a missing email. Besides, if THAT is what you want to fix, then fix
that by warning the user/root/wheel group upon login if there are files
in lost+found.

> If you like the tradeoff by all means set it on your boxes, it may be
> the right answer in your situation, but I don't like it for a default.

You're wrong. I had a discussion with Ted himself who sees that the
current way is wrong. You can find me ranting every fedora release that
it is wrong. I run boxes all over the planet, from RH9 to F9 and RHEL.
It's a problem. It's always been a problem.

What would help is to add /etc/sysconfig/autofsck with the line

 	# AUTOFSCK_OPT="-y"

so at least we don't have to keep reading rc.sysvinit to figure out which
version of fedora we need to change which script/variable to make this
happen.

Though personally, I'd prefer an Anaconda option for it.

 	"Unselect this option if you want to disable automatic repair
 	 attempts of the filesystem, and have a chance to use a
 	 raw filesystem editor to directly edit raw blocks on disk"

Let's face it. There are 10 people in the world who could and maybe want,
to do this to an ext3 filesystem, and I'm pretty sure they maintain less
then 0.00001% of the Fedora servers ouf there.

Paul