Migrating from Linux: mounting ext2fs

[andi payn]

On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 07:03, Miguel Gonçalves wrote:
> How stable is the FreeBSD support for ext2fs? 

First, if you're planning to migrate your server permanently, you're
probably better off reformatting in UFS: it's faster, and better for
error recovery. And computers that mount nfs/Samba/whatever shares won't
know the difference.

If you insist on keeping your partitions in ext2fs: I've seen a couple
of problems related to fsck. In particular, when a filesystem is dirty,
fsck.ext2 sometimes finds and fixes the problems but then fails to mark
the disk as clean (meaning that FreeBSD will refuse to mount it, if
you've specified read/write, and it'll be checked again next time you
reboot, and so forth). Personally, I've only seen this with ext3
(journaled) filesystems, but I don't know if that's universal.

So, to be safe, you'll probably want an rc script that mounts -r any of
your ext2 systems that were skipped. (Note that if /mnt/linux fails to
mount because it was dirty, /mnt/linux/usr, etc. will also fail to
mount.) This way, if the server gets hard-reset somehow, your users will
still be able to access their files, even if they aren't able to update
them, until you fix things.