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  • From: Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>
  • To: Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] init.d problems in devel
  • Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:28:02 -0700 (PDT)

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On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
Actually, it's not for ext2 (it's safe there), it's for other
filesystems. There's no "vote" issue, as SOFTFIX=yes should be default
for now until we can reimplement the crappy fsck command.

It's apparent from other replies (I'll just comment here since I don't
feel like starting a new email) there's some confusion on what fsck
does... it just passes checks and unrecognized arguments onto
filesystem-specific checkers "in a particular order" depending on what's
in fstab. The problem is that filesystem-specific checkers are doing a
really bad job of using consistent switches. So while the fsck manual
says -a is dangerous for some, everybody uses it anyways since ext2 maps
it to -n.

I just think we need a lot more intelligent fs checking on startup
because if an error happens bad stuff happens. I'd almost suggest we
spawn fsck checking off onto another unused terminal with an open tty
and use IPC (perhaps a file semaphore) to let init know it's done (and
deallocate the vc when it's done).

That way the fscks can never claim there's no terminal open (which is
causing most of the headache), plus you can do a bit more verbosity with
it since it's outputting to another terminal (perhaps 11 like how 12 is
often the logger). I'm also thinking perhaps we can add another field
to fstab to let the system know which filesystems are required for
continued booting. Everybody hates it when a fs fails and it's not
really needed to boot but it croaks the whole boot process.

Anything to make boot more graceful/intelligent is better, I think, as
there's been a historical lack of creativity wth the fsck process in
unix/linux as far as I'm aware, and it really needs some help, at least
the linux fsck.

I'm all for cleaning up our mountall.sh script to work more
specifically with different filesystems. However, I am strongly
against changing the fstab format.

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall | Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us | http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/ | SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/ #196285 | http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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