fsck in securelevel 2?

[Erik Trulsson]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 03:49:27PM +0200, Kövesdán Gábor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I tried to check the root partition with fsck and it found errors and 
> for my greatest surprise, it answered its questions automatically with 
> no. It is due to the securelevel 2? I've been thinking whether fsck uses 
> direct access (which is denied by the securelevel) or not?

Of course fsck uses some kind of direct access to the disk.
It would not be able to identify and repair problems with the
filesystem, if it had to go through the filesystem to access the disk.

And to quote the manpage for init(8) (which describes what the various
securelevels mean):
"Setting the security level above 1 too early in the boot sequence can
 prevent fsck(8) from repairing inconsistent file systems."

In the normal boot sequence fsck is run long before the securelevel is
raised so this is normally not a problem.


I hope the root partition had not been mounted as read/write when you
ran fsck, because if you run fsck on partition which is mounted r/w
fsck will often (incorrectly) report errors even if there are no
problems, and then one can really mess things up.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se