On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:52:18 +0100
Dieter <netbsd@sopwith.solgatos.com> wrote:

> 
> Actually you don't *have* to run fsck at all.  The only thing fsck
> does is recover lost space.  You can nice fsck down or not run it at
> all.
> 

Unless it detects an unexpected error.  I encountered one just a few
days ago -- duplicate block allocations...  (I'll be posting on that to
the Xen list.)  On-board disk write caches can easily produce that kind
of thing if there's a power hit.  (UPS?  Sure; I have one for each of
my machines.  The machines also have no way of knowing when the UPS
battery is dying, since last time I checked our USB stack was
sufficiently incompatible with Linux's that the usual daemons don't
work that way.)


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb