Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 09:03:37 -0400 (EDT) From: "Andresen,Jason R." <jandrese@mitre.org> To: Shannon Hendrix <shannon@widomaker.com> Cc: <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <20010523085147.N87127-100000@nausicaa.mitre.org> In-Reply-To: <20010522210824.C2734@widomaker.com>
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On Tue, 22 May 2001, Shannon Hendrix wrote: > On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 09:31:34AM -0400, Jason Andresen wrote: > > > We only have three Linux boxes here (and one is a PC104 with a flash > > disk) and already I've had to reinstall the entire OS once when we had a > > power glitch. ext2fsck managed to destroy about 1/3 of the files on the > > system, in a pretty much random manner (the lib and etc were hit hard). > > This is not typical. Also, I have heard the same thing from other people > about flash disks. fs crash, fsck, and a mess afterwards. It would be > nice if you could use ufs and see if the same problem exists. The scary thing is that it was the attached harddrive that lost all of the files. The situitation is this: Attached HD: I just installed Redhat on the hard drive. I rebooted and the system booted off of the harddrive normally. Successful install. I logged into the system and started looking into rebuilding the kernel to include the binary only M-Systems modules when a co-worker accidentally unplugged the wrong plug (he was working on some nearby machines), unplugging the power supply I was using to power the hard drives (and pretty much crashing the PC104 system). I powered down the PC104 system, and we plugged everything in again. When I tried to reboot the system, Lilo couldn't even find the kernel. I pulled out the emergency resuce disc (RedHat's install disk) and booted it up. When I ran fsck on the drive, it found error after error on the drive. Eventually I had to ^C that fsck run and try it again with the -y option (my arm was getting tired). Once fsck was done / was pretty much a ghost town, at which point I decided to just reinstall the system. It's entirely possible that there is something I could have done to prevent fsck from clearing out the filesystem, but it certainly isn't obvious from the manual, and I've never seen a FreeBSD system do that. Also, for anybody who says the pull the power test isn't realistic, I can assure you that power failures DO happen (probably less in your area than mine (I hope!)) and not planning for them only brings disaster later when you have a room with 1000 servers lose power. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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