Re: making bootup fsck more user-friendly

Hi and thanks for your reply.

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Johannes Wiedersich
<johannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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On 2008-06-13 11:25, David wrote:

[...]

read 'man tune2fs' for some tips for setting interval and mount count to
something that better meets your needs.

This isn't a solution for me. I want fsck to run regularly, but to
still have a way to by-pass it when I need to. Making fsck run less
frequently will leave me with the same problem. eg every 100th boot I
will still have to wait 10-20 minutes before I can start using the PC,
which is a royal PITA.

Ctrl-C worked without problems the last time I tried on my debian lenny.


I tested this on 2 Sid boxes, both had the problem. In the past (with
Testing & Stable) hitting Ctrl-C will randomly either leave the
partition read-only, or will re-mount it in write mode.

I think that in my case:

Hitting Ctrl+C breaks *both* fsck, and the script that started it
which is meant to re-mount read-write after fsck (failed or
successful)

And in your case:

Hitting Ctrl+C breaks fsck, but the calling script is not interrupted,
so it does remount the partition as read/write.

Possibly in my Sid systems, the system is more reponsive to Ctrl+C.

Which suggests another feature request for the sysvinit package:

- Don't terminate if the user breaks fsck with Ctrl+C. The user
should hit Ctrl+C twice if he wants to stop fsck & the script which
called it (and which is supposed to remount with read/write after the
fsck).


Set your mount count and intervals apropriately for your needs. You
could also fsck manually (shuttdown's -F option), whenever it suits you,
eg. disable automatic checking and only check manually.

This is a pain. I would need to find time when I'm not using the PC,
but still want it to be on, which is not often. I like to turn off my
PC when I'm not using it, and to not have to wait for it when I do
want to use it.


- /sbin/shutdown allows the user to (any of these would help):
* Force a fsck during the restart (-rF), and then to shut down the system.

Does not work for me, because I want to shut down the computer
completely, not just waste all that power with standby mode. I.e. if you
want to turn off the power supply completely, shutdown is not enough,
YOU have to switch off manually.


I think this depends on hardware. Most of my boxes shut down
completely when I run 'shutdown -P'. But there are a few (maybe old
kernel) which go into stand-by mode even when I really want shutdown
to power it off.

If shutdown isn't meant to work this way, then why does it have a -P option?


- ability for a readonly fsck on a r/w filesystem to gather info to
make a later fsck on the filesystem as r/o to find and fix problems
faster.

Do you have some technical expertise on how to implement this? I doubt
that the ext3 developpers overlooked that, if there was a good technical
solution....

Might be because ext3 devs are mainly focused on servers which are
turned on 24/7 & rarely rebooted. The kind of feature I'd like would
be more useful for desktop users.

David.


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