Rebooting

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 07 October 2007, Wulfy wrote:
> That's what I thought.  I know that fsck-ing a live partition is death
> to the file system and I couldn't see any way to remount everything read
> only...

There *is* a way.  Something with -o remount ro or something, but I've sat 
down with man mount and played, and never quite hit on the magic words to 
actually get it to happen.  The syntax is pretty obtuse, and the 
documentation not exactly enlightening.  I've never been determined enough to 
plug away at the problem hard enough to solve it.

> So.  I need to reboot to fsck...  how often?

I have no idea how often is recommended.  I suggest you tweak the options to 
have the partitions fscked every mount, or every other mount or something, 
since you reboot so infrequently. man tune2fs for details.  It has lots of 
suggested best practices right in the man page.

Another thing you can do is shut down by hand, with the -F option, to force 
fsck.  Something like

  $ shutdown now -F

which sets a flag that causes a manual fsck on the next boot.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre