Read Only

[Eric Sisler]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 15:21 -0700, Michael Scully wrote:

> 	I've been using external USB hard drives on RHEL for more than a
> year.  But this condition only happens on one system.  I make ext3
> filesystems on the devices (I have more than one here).  I can mount them
> fine and write to them fine.  But after a time period of inactivity, the
> drives spin down for power savings.  When they wake back up, the file
> systems become READ ONLY.  A simple umount and mount is all that's needed to
> remedy this, but I can't always do that in some automated processes.
> 
> 	Has anyone else seen this behavior?  The mount points are in the
> standard /media directory.

I've experienced a similar problem with internal drives on a couple of
Dell desktop PCs being used as firewalls.  Middle of the night with
little to no activity, the drive would go into power save mode and then
things would get ugly.

The drives are Maxtor, Dell provided a BIOS update to turn the drive's
power saving mode off.  I'd poke around the vendor's website a little
and see if they have something similar available.

-Eric

-- 
Eric Sisler <esisler at westminster.lib.co.us>
Library Network Specialist
Westminster Public Library
Westminster, CO USA

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