On Wednesday 28 March 2007, "Jeff Rollin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'SOLVED: Recover from LVM errors? (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] Help - system reboots while compiling)': > Ignore the following if you don't like minirants. (My reply probably needs the same disclaimer.)
> 1. Frankly, I'm not impressed with Linux in this case*. /var is not a > "mission critical" filesystem in the sense that if it contains errors, > it can still be mounted and the errors don't necessarily mean the > system won't come up. By that definition, no filesystem I can think of is "mission critial", they will all withstand some damage and still let your system come up. /var is *at least* as important as /usr -- I can easily recover the contents of /usr in case of critical failure, but reconstructing /var is damn near impossible. Also, /usr can generally be very useful with just r/o access, while /var needs to be r/w to fill it's role. Also, forcing a mount of a damaged filesystem is asking for trouble. Dangling inodes (or similar) can cause cascading failure; at best some processes will read garbage and crash (or, ideally, "magically" recover) at worst good data on the disk will be overwritten with bad. File locks on a damaged filesystem are meaningless since two files (not simply two dirents like with a hard link, but two unrelated files) might share disk sectors. The system should definitely refuse to mount damaged file systems by default or *at the very least* mount them read-only. I wouldn't mind and interactive prompt to force mounting a damaged filesystem, but I'd need a way to turn that off for unattended systems. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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