[GRLUG] WMNTUG Windows 7 Meeting

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 00:59 -0400, Jeff DeFouw wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 01:55:13PM -0400, john-thomas richards wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 01:46:40PM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > > > on boot when ext3 hit its 35-mount automatic fsck. (On a rather full
> > > > 1TB drive, that can take long enough so as to look like it's not
> > > > getting anywhere...)
> > > Ugh, I know!  You can change that with tune2fs.
> > How necessary is this anymore?
> For most of us, it's not.  I don't know why this is still on by 
> default.  

Paranoia is a virtue.  Just like firewalls default to On.

> I always turn it off.  You can always force a check on your 
> own time, like when you're not trying to do a quick (re)boot.

Which most users will never do.  If you know what "fsck" is, then you
are out of the "normal user" category.

> I've had kernels crash many times, including with bad RAM, and the 
> (manual) check never finds anything wrong.  That being said, all my 
> computers are on battery backups, so power failures won't be 
> interrupting my disk writes.

At this point I think filesystem issues are more likely to be caused by
bad [and undetected bad] hardware or kernel bugs.  Both of which are
rare but real.  

If you want to see fsck at work enable UDMA or unmasked interrupts on a
system with a buggy chipset.