Hi Boyd.
On 28/03/07, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
That's true.
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.
It IS a bad idea, but it's not like I "forced" a mount; the system
came up normally and functioned normally until it hit a damaged inode,
whereupon it crashed with nary an indication of what had gone wrong.
The system should definitely refuse to mount damaged file systems by
default or *at the very least* mount them read-only.
Agreed, definitely.
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/ \_/
Jeff.
--
Q: What will happen in the Aftermath?
A: Impossible to tell, since we're still in the Beforemath.
http://latedeveloper.org.uk
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