Checking the file system every 22 boots

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Sun 13 Apr 2008 10:04:27 Mike wrote:
> Mario Vukelic wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 00:02 +0300, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> >
> > That said, in Hardy you can abort the check on boot
>
> That's good news. I think it would be a much better idea
> however if the automatic check was done when shutting down as
> opposed to booting up. Having the option to run it at shutdown
> would be great. I have two very full 500 GB drives that take
> forever to fsck. When I boot up the computer, it's because I
> need to use it right away... not wait many, many minutes for
> fsck to complete.
>

I strongly disagree. When you shutdown the computer, you need it to be as 
clean and fast as possible. It's much more important for the shutdown to 
be fast than the boot process. For one thing, you might be shutting down 
due to a power failure, and you can't have the luxury of time when 
depending on UPS batteries to properly sync filesystems. 

If turning on the computer should be done as fast as possible for you, 
then the best should be to leave it on, for starters. If you *must* do a 
fsck, it really should be at the start. 

But as we all agree, the periodicity choosen so far is far more frequent 
than necessary. Better safe than sorry, as they say, and the fact that 
you can arbitrarily alter this configuration or even turn it off makes 
this issue really a non-issue. I access systems that go over a year 
before maintenance shutdowns (kernel updates, mostly), and the sysadmins 
there never reboot just for fsck (and I never heard of random data 
corrruption that was not caused by failing disks there). They use debian 
there, and I don't know if debian uses the same settings as ubuntu, but I 
would assume ubuntu does this in consideration for home users, which is 
the main intented audience.

regards
FF