Re: making bootup fsck more user-friendly

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:51:06AM +0200, David wrote:

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:25:23AM +0200, David wrote:
[...]

Sort answer, read the disk-related HOWTOs and try switching to JFS.


Unfortunately, experimenting with other filesystems will have to wait
until I have a spare drive. I don't know of a way to convert to other
filesystems on the fly :-) Also, the need to defer fsck seems like a
poor reason to go through the trouble of switching my home PC's
filesystem :-)


There are several hard-disk HOWTOs in the doc-linux-howto packages (pick
your format). Its not that hard if you have a spare partition or just
good backups. Its especially easy if you're using LVM. Without LVM I
admit it can be a bit of a shell-game but it only takes a few minutes
once you map it out.

Unless you're willing to rewrite fsck to get a defer mode, switching to
a faster fs is a valid option.


I disagree here. You can easily use up 300 MB on / by installing a few
large packages from Debian. Or are you saying that / should contain
almost nothing, and that /usr, /var/, etc should all be on separate
partitions?

Yes, when one says that / is 300MB, it means that /usr, /var, and /home
are separate. Etch won't fit on 512MB complete yet alone having any
special packages installed.


Maybe if your system is extremely critical you would need to have / this way.

Personally, I would like to be able to take a 500 GB drive, and put
the whole filesystem on / (including /boot, and a swap file) in my
home PC, and not be forced to wait for bootup fsck to scan the entire
drive every X days/boot before I can use it. I don't mind if it takes
an hour to scan, as long as that hour is not when I need to be
actively using the PC (after I tell the machine to shut down is a good
time).

I would call my home computer extremely critical. I don't want some
bug corrupting /usr or /var and making it so that I can't boot to fix
it. With / separate and small, the chances of it getting corrupted are
rather small.

Doug.



Also, that hour-long scan needs to be cleanly interruptible. Ctrl+C or
ESC needs to do the right thing.

David.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Weird Apache problem, hanging on particular data patterns
    ... I have checked ALL filesystems. ... When I split one of the two "weird" files up into 1k chunks only the ... This file when assembled hangs at exactly 1,130bytes, ... > with a subject of "unsubscribe". ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: LVM and disk failure
    ... > or RAID5. ... A single disk failure is harmless. ... > are some of the filesystems which they can contain. ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: find the blocksize of a FS
    ... else that doesn't rely on the utils (dumpe2fs, ... /proc/filesystems only gives what filesystems the kernel supports. ... if all else fails I think the python ctypes module should be able to get ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Editing run level S
    ... The scripts in this directory whose names begin with an 'S' are executed ... which is started later) and the filesystems have been cleaned. ... Mail has the best spam protection around ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
    (Debian-User)