At Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:06:23 +1030, Brett Lymn
<brett.lymn%baesystems.com@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: Lost file-system story
>
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 01:38:57PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> >
> > fsck is supposed to handle *all* corruptions to the file system that can
> > occur as part of normal file system operation in the kernel. It is doing
> > best effort for others. It's a bug if it doesn't do the former and a
> > potential missing feature for the latter.
> >
>
> There are a lot of slips twixt cup and lip. If you are really unlucky
> you can get an outage at just the wrong time that will cause the
> filesystem to be hosed so badly that fsck cannot recover it. Sure, fsck
> can run to completion but all you have is most of your FS in lost+found
> which you have to be really really desperate to sort through. I have
> been working with UNIX for over 20years now and I have only seen this
> happen once and it was with a commercial UNIX.
I've seen that happen more than once unfortunately. SunOS-4 once I think.
I agree 100% with Joerg here though.
I'm pretty sure at least some of the times I've seen fsck do more damage
than good it was due to a kernel bug or more breaking assumptions about
ordered operations.
There have of course also been some pretty serious bugs in various fsck
implementations across the years and vendors.
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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