On 01/07/2015 05:53 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Yes - the unattended fsck fails.
In that case, there should be logs indicating the cause of the error when it was detected by the kernel. There's probably something wrong with your controller or other hardware.
Personally, I'd prefer for the default run to use '-y' in the first place. It's not like I'm more likely than fsck to know how to fix it and it is very inconvenient on remote machines. The recent case was an opennms system updating a lot of rrd files, but I've also seen it on backuppc archives with lots of files and lots of hard links.
Every regular file's directory entry on your system is a hard link. There's nothing particular about links (files) that make a filesystem fragile.
It is mostly on aging hardware, so it is possible that there are underlying controller issues. I also see some rare cases on similar machines where a filesystem will go read-only with some scsi errors logged, but didn't look for that yet in this case.
It's probably a similar cause in all cases. I don't know how many times I've seen you on this list defending running old hardware / obsolete hardware. Corruption and failure are more or less what I'd expect if your hardware is junk.