Interrupting fsck during startup

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Wed Apr 1 14:04:42 EDT 2009


On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Michael ODonnell <
michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:

>
>
> Thanks for the responses.
>
> Tom Buskey wrote:
> > Shutdown cleanly so your system doesn't have to fsck.
>
> OMG!  And all this time we've been instructing our customers to just pull
> the AC plug from the wall when they're finished using the systems...  ;->


You never know with some of the questions here :-)


>
>
> Yes, of course, clean shutdowns are to be preferred.  But the problem in
> question is that our customers do find themselves occasionally needing
> to (re)start systems in time-critical situations when, for whatever


Or they *think* they need an emergency reboot.  This isn't windows.


>
> reason, fsck decides it's time to preen, even though the system was
> previously shutdown cleanly.  This seems clearly to be tied to ext3's
> defaults for the "Maximum mount count" and "Check interval" values and
> is not a problem with power-management or the startup/shutdown logic.
>
> We are investigating changing/disabling those values and, as suggested,
> relying instead on journal replays and scheduled, deliberate (as opposed
> to these pseudo-random) fsck runs to maintain/restore filesystem health.
> Changing filesystem types (to, say, ZFS) is ruled out primarily because
> of the logistical nightmare of inflicting such changes on systems in
> the field.


Switching to ZFS is a snarky reply.  It's as feasible to inflict on your
users as switching the servers to windows and desktops to linux.

I wouldn't suggest ZFS on anything but Solaris.  Well, maybe on FreeBSD.
Switching to either from Linux would probably cause the customers too much
pain.



>
>
> I'm still curious, though, why it's possible on some older systems
> (eg. RHEL3) to interrupt fsck using Ctl-C...
>
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