Ext3 - Frequent read-only FS issues

Dushyanth dushyanth at gmail.com
Tue Mar 24 15:37:48 UTC 2009


Hi,

Thanks Steve and Eric. My response below.

> 
> Steven Chervets wrote:
> > Dushyanth,
> > 
> > If you have the disk write-cache enabled it means that any power  
> > outage can cause file system corruption.  I would suggest that you put  
> > a battery in your disk controller and enable the write-cache on it,  
> > and at the same time, disable the write-cache on the disk itself.
> > 
> > If you can't get your hands on a battery, then disabled the write- 
> > cache on the hard disk and see if you get any more file system  
> > corruption errors.
> > 
> > Good Luck,
> > Steve
> 
> If you think it could be write-cache related, just mount with -o
> barrier=1, and see if things get better.  (or disable write cache on the
> disks with hdparm as Steve suggests)
> 
> Do you lose power much?  Do these errors correspond to power loss events?

These errors come up suddenly on running systems. We do IPMI based reboots for
power cycling the boxes when they hang.

Is it possible that some corruption that occurred during one such reboots to
cause a read only FS later on with the errors i mentioned ? Iam guessing yes,
cos force fsck during boot is not forced always cos sometimes a FS check is
suggested by ext3 during mounting the disk.

I will disable the disk caches and observe.

Thanks
Dushyanth






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