Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 00:32:19 -0600 From: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> To: Gore Jarold <gore_jarold@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: dangers of delaying an fsck on busy fileserver ? Message-ID: <464E99F3.3000602@samsco.org> In-Reply-To: <550589.3257.qm@web63006.mail.re1.yahoo.com> References: <550589.3257.qm@web63006.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
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Gore Jarold wrote: > I have a busy fileserver - 5-20 sftp/rsync processes > running on it at all times. > > For unknown reasons, this server crashes in the middle > of the night sometimes. When it does, I comment out > my four big arrays in /etc/fstab, reboot, and fsck > them manually (without a snapshot and BG fsck). > > Easy. The problem is, I need to sit around and wait > for an fsck in the middle of the night and then > re-edit fstab and reboot. > > So I am curious ... what happens if I instruct the NOC > tech to just press the reset switch instead of calling > me ? If he does this, the system will boot, the > arrays will come online, and since I have a very very > long time set until bg_fsck starts, I can then reboot > the machine and foreground fsck it during sunlight > hours. > > But it does mean that users will continue to operate > on those dirty disks for 4-8 hours until I do that. > > Is this a dangerous strategy ? > > Does this put me at some increased risk of finding > myself with disks that cannot be fsck'd ? (I've never > seen it, but I have heard horror stories...) > > Will I lose a lot of the data that has been transacted > during the hours that the disks were used in a dirty > state ? > > Any comments ? > In an ideal world, the only consequence of delaying bgfsck is that not all filesystem blocks will be marked free that should be. So if you deleted a large tree of files before the crash, those blocks might still show up in use until bgfsck completes. Scott
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