Fsck

Yesterday we lost power for about 45 minutes here in the office.  Not really sure why, but we did.  Everything worked like it was supposed to, UPS’s are all good.  I went ahead and shut the servers down right away.  I thought I’d preserver the batteries in case for some reason we really needed them, and only our servers have UPS’s so no one could access them so there was no reason for them to run until the batteries were going out.

So anyway, 45 minutes later the power came back on, I turned everything back on and expected to be back up and running in a matter of minutes.  Well, our PDC (Primary Domain Controller for those less geeky-types – a.k.a. the MAIN server) said it had been 231 days since fsck had been run (file system check), and it needed to run now.  The problem was it’s a 350GB partition, and fsck can take awhile.  The real problem turned out to be that I couldn’t cancel it.  It didn’t ask me if it was OK to run fsck now, and I couldn’t CTRL-C to cancel it like I’ve done in other distributions.  A little research revealed that Ubuntu won’t let you cancel it.  So long story short, the server down an extra 2 hours because it was running fsck.  Nothing was wrong with the server, it was just performing routine maintenance, on its own, without permission from me.  So I sat there for 2 hours and watched it fsck, taking calls and telling people the server would be up soon, but not yet.  It was quite frustrating.

So I ran tune2fs to stop all this automatic forced fscking business.

From now on, Server, you’ll fsck when I tell you to fsck, and you won’t fsck unless I want you to!