fsck!

[Bill Moran]

Brett Glass wrote:
> At 06:43 PM 6/27/2003, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
>>You're supposed to boot into single-user mode to repair the
>>filesystems before attempting to bring it up to multiuser state.
> 
> Ah... but you're not there at the exact moment when the power
> comes back on. (Maybe it was just a flicker and there was no
> UPS, or maybe the power company -- like ours -- is so slow to
> fix outages that the UPS battery was fully drained.)

Normally, fsck is able to automatically handle the problem after
a dirty shutdown.  In all the dirty shutdowns I've seen, I've only
had to manually run fsck maybe twice.

As far as the power sit is concerned: if you have a UPS and you
don't have some sort of monitoring software to gracefully shutdown
the machine during extended outages, you're shooting yourself in
the foot!  Kind of like getting a car with all the fancy safety
features so you can drink a bottle of vodka before you drive.

Regardless, isn't this the reason background fsck was developed in 5?

> What's more, even if you CAN boot into single user mode and run 
> fsck, it can be frustrating. Sometimes a partition takes two
> or three passes to clean up.

Yeah, that is a PITA, but I can understand the reason.

> Sometimes fsck randomly refuses
> to work on one. It's a mess.

Never had that happen.

> Ideally, the system would handle the logistics. It's not as if
> powering down without shutting down is that rare of an 
> occurrence.

Really?  Doesn't happen all that often to me.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com