Topic: System Maintenance

[Dave Rozendal]

Last night, our power went out for several hours.  When my server rebooted, I received an error message that said some system files needed to have maintenance performed.  The options I have are to ctrl-d to reboot, which only gets me back to the error message, or to enter the root password to perform maintenance.  After entering the password, it gives me a line saying repair file system 1 #:  This is where I get stuck.  What do I do next?

Thanks for any insite.

Dave

[Rob Delissen]

Happened to me a few times. I take out a linux-guide, look at fsck and his repair options. Helped me out everytime.
Good luck
Rob

[Dub Dublin]

Use fsck (File System ChecK).  This is the ugly price we pay for not having a modern journalling filesystem.  fsck can take a darn long time on a big drive like the 100GB one I just put in my most recent e-smith server.

Generally, fsck alone will fix the problem, but things can get pretty botched up from time to time.  You can use "fsck -y" if you're brave, or have good backups (generally, having backups makes you brave...)  The "-y" tells fsck to go ahead and try to fix everythign without asking you first.  Usually OK, but can occasionally lay waste to a filesystem.  Did I mention good, frequent backups are important?