fstab Pass Column and forced disk checks

[Kyle Brandt]

Thank you everyone for your responses.  I agree with Andreas about not
disabling the checks in general, but in this case I don't have the final
word.  I will look into the lvm script, is that limited to ext4 or does it
work with ext3 as well?

I cross posted this question at
http://serverfault.com/questions/120804/pass-column-of-fstab/120815#120815and
someone noticed that there is one exception (not a fstab exception
though) on some distributions (RHEL5).  That is if /forcefsck file system
exists the check will still happen because of /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

if [ -f /forcefsck ] || strstr "$cmdline" forcefsck ; then
        fsckoptions="-f $fsckoptions"

Thanks!
Kyle

On 3/9/10, Andreas Dilger <adilger at sun.com> wrote:
>
> On 2010-03-09, at 10:10, Kyle Brandt wrote:
>
>> If I have the 6th column in fstab (the pass column) set to 0, does that
>> mean disk checks will never be forced at boot regardless of anything like
>> File System State, Mount Count, and Check Interval on the file system
>> itself, or are there exceptions to this?
>>
>
> No, there are many filesystems which don't have/allow checking so the
> top-level fsck tool needs to honor this.  I would never recommend disabling
> e2fsck on a system, unless you are running in an HA environment where it is
> not safe to do automated checks at startup time.  I also do not recommend
> that people disable the periodic e2fsck checks, because people forget to
> check their filesystems, and the kernel can sometimes spread corruption
> further if it reads garbage from the disk.
>
> If you dislike the periodic (time/mount count) checks that e2fsck forces at
> boot, I would suggest using the "lvcheck" script I posted to linux-ext4 some
> months ago (assuming you are using LVM, which most people are these days),
> and will attach here again. That allows you to periodically check the
> filesystem in the background to detect corruptions on disk, without any
> concern that the next reboot will take a long time.
>
> It would be great to get these included as part of the lvm2 package, and
> have lvcheck installed in /etc/cron.weekly to automatically check all the
> LVs configured on the system, and solve the "we don't like periodic checks
> at boot" problem in a way that is still robust to the errors that will
> undoubtably appear on disk at one point or another.
>
> Cheers, Andreas
> --
> Andreas Dilger
> Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
> Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.
>
>
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