Re: periodic fsck [Was: Re: Linux ready for the home desktop?]

["Kristian Erik Hermansen" <user=152@nabble.blu.org>]

 You've gotta fsck every so often to maintain good health :-) 



On 3/27/08, Matthew Gillen <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> Dan Ritter wrote: 
> > On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:48:58AM -0400, Mark Hertel wrote: 
> >> On 3/27/08, Brendan <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> >> 
> >> But Linux does this when you've shut it down correctly. Windows only does 
> it 
> >> when you've screwed up by turning off the power instead of an orderly 
> >> shutdown. 
> > 
> > Two things: 
> > 
> > First, the usual criteria for deciding on whether or not to do a 
> > full fsck is either N mounts, or T days, since the last fsck. 
> 
> Right, but assuming a journaled file-system like ext3, the reason for doing 
> the fsck periodically (whether you do it every N mounts or T days doesn't 
> matter) is that either you don't trust your file-system code (no doubt what 
> those BSD guys thought was the issue) or you don't trust your hardware. 
> 
> I think the latter is the reason most distros ship with the defaults such 
> that 
> fsck happens periodically even if there is no reason to believe there is a 
> fault.  Most (desktop) hardware doesn't have ECC memory and such, so given 
> enough time, there is a pretty good possibility of getting a bit flipped 
> somewhere.  If you're unlucky and it happens to be in the memory holding 
> your 
> file-system driver...let's just say the sooner you catch the problem the 
> less 
> likely you are to lose data. 
> 
> Incidentally, I had a partially bad memory bank once, and it just so 
> happened 
> that the file-system driver would /always/ get loaded into that memory. 
> Every 
> time I booted up I had a corrupt file-system.  I finally got wise and yanked 
> that memory stick out, and the problem went away. 
> 
> Matt 
> 
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