[CentOS] Preventing hour-long fsck on ext3-filesystem

[Toby Bluhm]

Bernhard Gschaider wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm justing in the process of setting up a new fileserver for our
> company. I'm installing CentOS 5.3 (64 bit) on it.
> 
> One of the "problems" with it is that it has a 3.5TB filesystem for
> the user data which I formatted during setup as an ext3. Now my
> experience with our current fileserver is that a 0.5TB ext3 filesystem
> needs approx half an hour to complete (and kicks in every so and so
> reboots or every 180days). My estimate is that for the larger
> filesystem (and the faster machine) the fsck would need well over an
> hour (being optimistic). I dread the day when I have to reboot the
> server and wait for 2hours or more just because the system thought it
> would be a prudent thing to check the filesystem.
> 
> My question:
> 
>  - is there another stable filesystem (XFS, ReiserFS ...) in the
>    centosplus-kernel where this could be avoided (fsck is faster) and
>    that is as safe as ext3
>  - Or would it be better to switch off automatic checking with tune2fs
> 
> Any opinion/experience welcome. I looked around a bit but couldn't
> find a good answer
> 
> Bernhard
> 
> PS: Sorry for the stupid question, but I'm only part-time admin and
> testing this myself would take weeks, I guess
> 

If you use ext3 on LVM, you could every once in a while make a snapshot 
of the fs & do a background fsck on the snapshot.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/ext3-users/2008-January/msg00032.html



-- 
tkb