From owner-cvs-all Mon May 14 16:28:14 2001 Delivered-To: cvs-all@freebsd.org Received: from smtp05.primenet.com (smtp05.primenet.com [206.165.6.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E92137B423; Mon, 14 May 2001 16:28:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr06.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp05.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id QAA24616; Mon, 14 May 2001 16:28:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr06.primenet.com(206.165.6.206) via SMTP by smtp05.primenet.com, id smtpdAAAHUaO.V; Mon May 14 16:27:55 2001 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr06.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA05923; Mon, 14 May 2001 16:34:07 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200105142334.QAA05923@usr06.primenet.com> Subject: Re: [kris@obsecurity.org: Re: cvs commit: src/etc rc] To: mckusick@mckusick.com (Kirk McKusick) Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 23:34:02 +0000 (GMT) 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 In-Reply-To: <200105132342.QAA21879@beastie.mckusick.com> from "Kirk McKusick" at May 13, 2001 04:42:55 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > > 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