fsck on a mounted file system?


 
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# 1  
Old 11-16-2005
fsck on a mounted file system?

I have a Solaris 7 box. We got a strange error in the syslog, which read as follows:
Code:
Nov 15 11:50:16 server-01 unix: NOTICE: free inode /mount1/8025691 had size 0x20d

I consulted with a fellow sysadmin, and he suggested running "fsck -N" on the filesystem in question without unmounting it. So I did, and got a bunch of errors that read as follows:

Code:
LINK COUNT FILE I=5363232  OWNER=nobody MODE=0
SIZE=0 MTIME=Nov 16 08:53 2005  COUNT 0 SHOULD BE -1
ADJUST?  no

UNREF FILE  I=12544363  OWNER=nobody MODE=100600
SIZE=1891 MTIME=Nov 16 08:52 2005 
RECONNECT?  no

these are just examples. Should I worry about these? I'm thinking that mounted file system with active processes would always be "dirty". But I'm not sure that I'm even supposed to run fsck on a mounted file system, even with -N option. Is -N option save or am I doing some kind of a damage?

Last edited by Yogesh Sawant; 04-10-2011 at 11:09 AM.. Reason: added code tags
# 2  
Old 11-16-2005
If fsck changes nothing, it can do no damage. Normally I use -n to prohibit fsck from changing stuff, but the Solaris man page says -N works too. So it is not dangerous. How useful it is on a mounted filesystem varies. It depends on how busy the filesystem is. I would do a "sync" first (although I think that fsck does its own sync).

Your original message would bother me enough to unmount the filesystem and then do an fsck on it. When I suspect trouble, even with an unmounted filesystem, I do a -n first. Too many times I have run an interactive fsck and been stuck typing y a few hundred times. With -n, I can gauge how many and how severe the errors are. Then I can decide if my next step is fsck, fsck -y, or newfs.
 
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