Part of the problem that I'm concerned about is that the vast majority of Ubuntu users are less experienced that say Debian users. That's not a slight against Ubuntu users, but merely a statement of fact; Ubuntu has done a lot of good work to allow less experienced users to be able to install and use Linux. That is a good thing; a very good thing. But it also means that sometimes the protecting users against themselves is in fact a good thing. There is a reason why there are safety interlocks on lawn mowers; giving more control to inexperienced users is not always a good thing.
So if the filesystem is corrupted such that if the system is booted, the "mission critical" application would silently give the wrong answers, or perhaps trade the wrong stocks, or give the 1000 times the amount of X-rays necessary to the human body, would you really be doing the user a favor by giving them the ability to skip an fsck because they are impatient? For life and mission critical systems, usually the designers want to give less control to the users (who often are not sophisticated computer users), not more control. If the system has to be kept running in order to keep some mission critical system going, then the right answer is to have backup systems and a high availability system (such as Linux-HA) which enables the backup when the primary system is not available. Skipping necessary filesystem checks just because "it might take too long" and allowing potential silent failures is Just A Bad Idea. Then too, if you really want to avoid long delays due to periodic fsck's, the right answer is to use devicemapper, and have a cron script fired during the off-hours (say 1am on Sunday nights, when no one is using the system), which takes a read-only snapshot of the filesystem, and then run the e2fsck against the snapshot once a week or once a month. If there are any discrepancies detected when checking the read- only snapshot, then the script should either send e-mail to the system administrator requesting scheduled maintenance ASAP to fix the problem, or if there is a HA system running, the script should signal the HA system that it is about to take the system down, then shutdown the applications and force a reboot and fsck of the corrupted filesystem. If no errors are detected in the read-only snapshot, then the read-only snapshot can be released and "tune2fs -C 0 -T now /dev/sdXX" can be used on the original filesystem indicate that it has been successfully checked. So there are clean ways of avoiding the slow boot-time checks while actually increasing the system reliability, besides letting a potentially clueless user skip a necessary system function out of impatience. -- fsck freezes on laptop https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/124773 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
