Checking the file system every 22 boots

[Ioannis Vranos]

Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> Bob McConnell wrote:
>> It is necessary. About one in five passes it finds a few orphaned inodes 
>> on my systems. You can adjust the frequency by changing a value in 
>> /etc/fstab. But if your system stays up most of the time, there is also 
>> a maximum days between runs buried somewhere. So when I took down a 
>> server that had been up for 200 days to install additional drives, all 
>> of the partitions on the existing drives were checked when it booted 
>> back up.
> 
> 
> If I recall well, under Scientific Linux/CentOS/(Red Hat EL) x86, no
> thorough fsck is made. Under versions 4.x if the system powers off
> uncleanly it recovers by using the journal and it asks you if you want
> to perform a thorough check with a time-out of some seconds, after which
> it proceeds without thorough check. I think something like this happens
> with versions 5.x x86.
> 
> Since ext3 is very robust in its default "ordered" journalling mode, why
> a thorough check is enforced every 22 boots?


On the other hand, Red Hat stays to a specific kernel for each Red Hat
Enterprise Linux version and backports any bug fixes continuously.

Also they perform extensive testing and hand tuning of the kernel and
the rest of software, perform QA, etc, so perhaps they don't do thorough
tests of ext3 after a specific boot count, because they have tested the
kernel extensively and know it will not damage the filesystem due to bugs.