Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 10:23:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> To: philip@adhesivemedia.com (Philip Hallstrom) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How to make FreeBSD's hard drive as reliable as possible? Message-ID: <200207111423.g6BENrI01091@clunix.cl.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20020710165513.O7573-100000@cypress.adhesivemedia.com> from "Philip Hallstrom" at Jul 10, 2002 05:01:00 PM
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> > Hi - > I was wondering what steps one can take to make the hard drive as > reliable as possible on FreeBSD. By reliable I mean what can I do to > ensure that if the power gets flipped off the box will come back up > unattended in a usuable state. As you have apparently discovered, the usual reason it might not come right back up is fsck errors. If the power is cut, there is a high probability that some data is corrupted if the system is busily being used with processes writing to disk. If you are willing to lose those pieces of data - which you will probably lose anyway, even with making heroic efforts to recover it - then just set the fsck_y_enable=yes and let 'er rip. Probably you would just give y-s to the fsck prompts anyway. A UPS is also helpful to allow a system to come back automatically and can help with taking a system down more gracefully during power loss. Mirroring and frequent backups are also essential, but of course, don't quite recover automatically. I don't think having softupdates on will matter much on how much you recover after a power failure, though, maybe with a good UPS they could actually help. > - Some of the filesystems need to be read/write (/var for instance). Is > it worth setting /usr to read-only if nothing ever gets written to it > anyway? Probablly meaningless because if no files are open for writing in the filesystem, then files won't be clobbered and thus won't cause a problem for fsck. ////jerry > > - How dangerous is setting fsck_y_enable=YES in /etc/rc.conf? The man > page suggests it can be pretty dangerious, but the alternative is to have > to go hook a monitor up to the box and deal with it manually.. > > - Should I turn softupdates off? I'm not really concerned > about performance.. > > - What else? > > Thanks all! > > -philip > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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