Interrupting fsck during startup

[Tom Buskey]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Michael ODonnell <
michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> In certain time-critical situations it is desirable that we be able to
> interrupt fsck as it tries to preen certain huge filesystems.  Yes, we
> know that interrupting fsck is not good sysadmin hygiene and we generally
> discourage such behavior, but when a machine is being (re)booted in a
> crisis situation where seconds matter it's at least an option we'd like
> to have available to us.  In some older distributions of Linux it was
> possible to interrupt fsck via Ctl-C even if it was launched from one
> of the init scripts, but this "feature" seems not to be available with
> some more recent distributions we're working with, including CentOS5.2.
> Does anybody know how to enable this or what was changed or why?
>
> This is apparently quite a thorny issue as it involves trying to make
> sense of the esoterica associated with job-control, signal handling,
> ttys and /dev/console, any one of which is challenging by itself and
> nearly impenetrable in combination...  >-/
>


Shutdown cleanly so your system doesn't have to fsck.

If it's a power outage, those systems should be on a UPS & run software that
will do a clean shutdown if power goes out.  You generally need only 5-10
minutes of runtime for this.

If running shutdown -h doesn't result in a clean filesystem, fix your
shutdown scripts.

If you're not using shutdown -h to get a clean shutdown, you should expect
to fsck.

/* Snarky reply */

Use a file system that doesn't fsck.
Like ZFS (only OpenSolaris ).

Or NetApp.

I think btrfs will be comparable.

/* ykrans */
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