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Date:      Sat, 28 Jun 2003 13:18:04 -0400
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: fsck!
Message-ID:  <3EFDCDCC.7010507@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20030627195013.029d4a70@localhost>
References:  <4.3.2.7.2.20030627165224.03568100@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030627165224.03568100@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030627195013.029d4a70@localhost>

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Brett Glass wrote:
[ ... ]
> 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.)

Unattended restarts can more difficult, agreed.

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

Most of the time-- and by that I mean more than 90% of the time-- the system is 
capable of fsck'ing itself automatically and without the need for human 
intervention.  This is more true for relatively quiet or read-only systems, and 
less true for systems which are very busy, have many writes pending, etc.

You might want to consider using a journalling filesystem instead, although you 
would have to switch platforms and pay for something like Veritas VxFS.

> Ideally, the system would handle the logistics. It's not as if
> powering down without shutting down is that rare of an 
> occurrence. (It eats holes in any system, and is responsible for
> gradual "bit rot" in both Windows machines and BSD machines.)

The following option for /etc/rc.conf may be of interest to you:

#fsck_y_enable='YES'

...it's not as safe as the default preen, but if your concern is to have the 
system "handle the logistics" without human intervention if at all possible, 
this might be want you want.

-- 
-Chuck



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