Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 23:34:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mckusick@mckusick.com (Kirk McKusick) Cc: mi@misha.privatelabs.com (Mikhail Teterin), kris@obsecurity.org (Kris Kennaway), cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG, ru@FreeBSD.ORG (Ruslan Ermilov), fs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [kris@obsecurity.org: Re: cvs commit: src/etc rc] Message-ID: <200105142334.QAA05923@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <200105132342.QAA21879@beastie.mckusick.com> from "Kirk McKusick" at May 13, 2001 04:42:55 PM
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> > > Working under the assumption that the only time fsck is likely to fail > > > in this manner is if there are FS errors which can't be resolved in > > > the background, and which may result in further FS damage if left > > > uncorrected, the best option seems to be to take some action which > > > prevents this damage. > > > > > > The best series of actions might be the following: > > > > > > 1) Downgrade the FS to readonly mode. > > > > Can't a foreground fsck be run at this moment? Having to reboot for > > anything is rather ugly... I'm sure there is a reason it can not, I'm > > just wondering, what that reason is. Thanks! > > Indeed, a foreground fsck can be run once the downgrade to read-only > has happened. However, doing so automatically is unlikely to be useful > since nearly every error that would get us to this point will also > cause an `fsck -p' to fail. So, at this point a system administrator > is going to have to intervene to do a manual fsck. Once the downgrade > to read-only has happened, no further filesystem damage can occur, so > there is not a great rush to run the manual fsck. However, if the > affected filesystem is something crucial like /var, the system may not > run at all well until the problem is fixed. Rebooting is a good idea, in any case, since you really can't trust the results of programs run from a bogified FS. So it would not be safe, for example, to fsck it, get it clean, and then remount it read/write, since the programs you are running now came from a damaged FS (seriously damaged, if a background fsck doesn't succeed). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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