From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Aug 17 20:19:11 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5AD4D106566B for ; Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:19:11 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd@dreamchaser.org) Received: from nightmare.dreamchaser.org (nightmare.dreamchaser.org [12.32.44.142]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E8858FC14 for ; Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:19:10 +0000 (UTC) Received: from breakaway.dreamchaser.org (breakaway.dreamchaser.org. [12.32.36.73]) by nightmare.dreamchaser.org (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id q7HKJ8bw003491 for ; Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:19:08 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from freebsd@dreamchaser.org) Message-ID: <502EA73B.6000008@dreamchaser.org> Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:19:07 -0600 From: Gary Aitken User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120609 Thunderbird/13.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD Mailing List Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-2.0.2 (nightmare.dreamchaser.org [12.32.36.65]); Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:19:08 -0600 (MDT) Subject: fsck recoveries, configuration X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: freebsd@dreamchaser.org List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:19:11 -0000 When my system hangs and I have to force it to power cycle, I sometimes have some fsck issues. So some questions: 1. It appears to me that the file system (ufs) is not writing stuff out when things are idle. If I do a sync manually and leave the machine idle and it crashes later, it comes up clean. If I don't do a sync manually and it crashes later, it often comes up needing fsck. Is there a way to configure the filesystem to cache but still write cached stuff at low priority? 2. When my machine hung (could not rlogin or ping), I powered off and rebooted. Reboot did a deferred fsck. After it booted I logged in, and also logged in on another system. On the remote system I could do a ping but rlogin returned "connection reset by peer", even though I could log in locally. I presume that is because the background fscks were not complete? I then did a ps ax | grep fsck and saw only the "logger" process for the deferred fsck's. I did a man logger which appeared to hang -- no output. I'm guessing because it needed the filesystems which hadn't yet fsck'd. I then attempted to switch consoles using fn but could not. I then attempted to kill the man logger process using ^C with no success. Can someone shed light on the above sequence of events? It's highly likely some of them occurred before the 60 second delay for fsck timed out, but I'd like to understand what the heck is going on. Thanks, Gary