Ext3 - Frequent read-only FS issues

Theodore Tso tytso at mit.edu
Tue Mar 24 16:36:18 UTC 2009


On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 03:37:48PM +0000, Dushyanth wrote:
> > 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.

I assume you do have a full fsck done on the filesystem after you see
these errors?

> 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.

If an fs check is getting suggested by ext3 during the mounting of the
disk, then your boot scripts must not be set up correctly, or
/etc/fstab has been set up to disable fsck getting run automatically
on said filesystem.

I would strongly recommend running forced fsck to make sure all of
your filesystems are clean first; if the errors have been around for a
while, and for some reason the automatic fsck has been disabled so
they aren't getting checked, that could be really bad.

     	    	    	     	  	- Ted




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