Last January, a server I run (Red Hat 9) was rebooted (I don't remember why). When it came back up, it reported problems with one partition and I was given a shell prompt and told (as best I can remember) to run fsck manually. I did and when it asked if I wanted to fix the problems it found, I said yes. Upon exiting and rebooting, the system was dead. Oh, it would boot but many of the files that were "fixed" by fsck were in /usr/sbin and they would not run. This included httpd, sendmail and sshd. It was a pain but I decided that this would be as good a time as any to upgrade from whatever old system I had to FC1. I had recently bought a new hard drive and installed to that, then mounted the old drive and was able to recover pretty much everything without having to dig into my "real" backups. Things went relatively smoothly and I soon had a happily running FC1 server. Deep sigh. This morning I was working near the server and needed to move the UPS that it's plugged into. Unfortunately, I pressed the UPS power switch (which should be harder to press!) and the room went quiet! Yikes. Okay, don't panic. I turned things back on and the server started up. I got virtually the same message as last time which said to run fsck manually. Naturally, I was a bit worried about doing that but didn't see what choice I had. Knowing the worst that would happen is I'd have to go to backups, I went ahead and fixed the errors found. Fortunately for me, the system booted properly afterwards and everything seems to be running. There may be problems I haven't found yet but at least the main things are working. The two incidents were 11 months apart and on different physical drives (although the rest of the hardware is the same). The system was not rebooted from the time I finished the upgrade in January until today. Sure, it is time (at least) to upgrade from FC1 to FC3 but I'm always happier doing it in MY time and not because I have to. My question... Is there something I should be doing to prevent this sort of thing? On a system that doesn't get rebooted very often, should fsck be run manually from time to time? Or would this just cause the same sort of problem? Any suggestions so that I don't have a repeat of this next November would be appreciated. -- Henry
