dangers of delaying an fsck on busy fileserver ?

[Gore Jarold]

I have a busy fileserver - 5-20 sftp/rsync processes
running on it at all times.

For unknown reasons, this server crashes in the middle
of the night sometimes.  When it does, I comment out
my four big arrays in /etc/fstab, reboot, and fsck
them manually (without a snapshot and BG fsck).

Easy.  The problem is, I need to sit around and wait
for an fsck in the middle of the night and then
re-edit fstab and reboot.

So I am curious ... what happens if I instruct the NOC
tech to just press the reset switch instead of calling
me ?  If he does this, the system will boot, the
arrays will come online, and since I have a very very
long time set until bg_fsck starts, I can then reboot
the machine and foreground fsck it during sunlight
hours.

But it does mean that users will continue to operate
on those dirty disks for 4-8 hours until I do that.

Is this a dangerous strategy ?

Does this put me at some increased risk of finding
myself with disks that cannot be fsck'd ?  (I've never
seen it, but I have heard horror stories...)

Will I lose a lot of the data that has been transacted
during the hours that the disks were used in a dirty
state ?

Any comments ?


 
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