On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 06:56:17AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Michael Hannon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Greetings.  We have a lately had a lot of trouble with relatively large
> >  (order of 1TB) file systems mounted on RAID 5 or RAID 6 volumes.  The
> >  file systems in question are based on ext3.
.
.
.
> >  After the RAID array has completed its rebuild, we run fsck on the RAID
> >  device.  When we do that, fsck seems to run forever, i.e., for days at a
> >  time, occasionally spitting out messages about files with recognizable
> >  names, but never completing satisfactorily.
> >
> 
> fsck of 1TB is going to take days  due to the linear nature of it
> checking the disk. [ I think the disks for mirrors.kernel.org take
> many weeks to fsck.] The bigger question is what kind of data are you
> writing to these disks, and is the ext3 journal large enough for those
> writes?
> 
> 
> >  The systems in question are typically running SL 4.x.  We've read that
> >  the version of fsck that is standard in SL 4 has some known bugs,
> >  especially wrt large file systems.
> >
> >  Hence, we've attempted to repeat the exercise with fsck.ext3 taken from
> >  the Fedora 8 distribution.  This gives us improved, but still not
> >  satisfactory, results.
> >
> 
> Did you recompile the binary from source, or did you use it straight?
> I am just wondering if fsck is dependant on some kernel particulars...

We just used the binary straight.  Thanks, Stephen.

					- Mike
-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677