rh7.3 filesystem becomes read only after update!?

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2005-03-31 13:57:03 +0200, Jeroen Wunnink wrote:
> This usually means the filesystem jumps into read only mode because some fs 
> errors have occured.
> We've had this problem last month with a server, and it ended up that the 
> harddisk was going bad.
> 
> You can try to remount the filesystem first: 'mount -o remount /home' for 
> example and see if that solves it..

I wouldn't do this.  Ext2/3 goes into read-only mode only if it
discovers a serious inconsistency, so if you mount that filesystem rw
and then write some data to it, there is risk of further damaging it.

> If not, you can try to unmount the filesystem directly if possible (make 
> sure there's no processes keeping it occupied) and do a e2fsck on it, or 
> reboot it in single user mode and then fsck all filesystems if it concerns 
> / or /boot for example..

He has only / and /boot:

> >/dev/md2 on / type ext3 (rw)
> >/dev/md1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)

This also explains why there is nothing in the log files: After / was
remounted read-only syslogd couldn't write to /var/log/messages any
more.

> Advice: back up the system and go swap the harddisk..

He has RAID arrays, so he has to find out which hard disk to swap
first. (What kind of RAID arrays are these? A single disk going bad
shouldn't cause filesystem errors on RAID-1 or RAID-5)

1) Make a backup immediately (unless you already have
   one which is new enough). 

2) Reboot the server. It should check the filesystems and hopefully
   restore it to as useable state.

3) Check the harddisks. smartmontools have already been mentioned. 
   A simple "dd if=/dev/$disk of=/dev/null bs=64k" for all disks is also
   quite good at finding errors. 

4) If no harddisk errors have been found, try to find out what caused
   the filesystem corruption.


-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer \Beta means "we're down to fixing misspelled comments in
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR     \the source, and you might run into a memory leak if 
| |   | hjp at wsr.ac.at     \you enable embedded haskell as a loadable module and
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