[TriLUG] e2fsck under cron gets retcode=8 operational error

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2012, Joseph S. Tate wrote:

> Ok, stupid question time:
>
> Why do you bother to umount at all?  Why not just do it at 
> shutdown?

This device will be in the hands of non-computer people. I'm 
worried that someone will pull out the flash drive to have a 
look at what's on it, just for the hell of it.

I don't know whether I should have to plan for such things, 
but I thought if it could be handled easily, with fsck -f, 
then I should handle it.

Currently it's only mounted for the second or two every 
5minutes that the photos are being written. If the user pull 
the drive while it's not flashing, the flash drive will be 
OK.

> Why haven't you already turned off mount count and time 
> based checking on that volume (from another system 
> perhaps) if you're forcing a fsck every hour anyway?

I was assuming that fsck -f would work and hopefully would 
handle any disasters from the flash drive being pulled while 
the box was running or any corruption that might happen to 
the filesystem when running for years at a time.

> Why are you running fsck so frequently?  Won't that 
> prematurely age your thumb drive?

the number of writes are in the millions now adays. At 1 
forced fsck/hr, I don't expect the drive to wear out.

> Why are you using ext2/3/4 on a thumb drive instead of a 
> FS built for flash storage so that you get error detection 
> and correction as a feature of the FS instead of having to 
> kludge this whole convoluted thing together?

I'm expecting the users to only have windows boxes and that 
they'll want to retrieve the photos sometime. I haven't 
figured out a good way to let them do this. Do they pull the 
drive and mount it on a windows box? In this case, the flash 
drive should be FAT32 or ntfs. AFAIK ntfsfix only sets the 
dirty flag so that chkdsk will run on it. Neither of those 
is a good solution for a device which has to operate for a 
decade untouched. Flash file systems are out (and so is 
ext3) if the drive has to be mounted on a windows box. If I 
leave the flash drive in, do I export it with samba? In this 
case, the user will need to set the workgroup (I think). 
While I was thinking about it how to handle the user 
retrieving their photos, I thought I'd see if I could run 
the box for a couple of months, without it crashing, 
recording photos as it went and running fsck -f every day, 
even if it winds up that I don't use ext3 for the final 
solution.

It hasn't been as simple as I'd hoped.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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