Agile Aspect wrote:

Is this necessary for ext3 filesystems?

Can't hurt, though I don't do this myself, most of my systems have pretty stable storage, been a while since I used a controller/system that caused problems that would make me want to fsck.

Is this a safe thing to do for a ext3 filesystems?

fsck'ing a ext3 file system is perfectly safe, if it is mounted uncleanly the system even prompts you to do a full fsck during bootup(if you don't hit a key it continues with just the journal check)

For my SAN-based file systems I do explicitly fsck them each time they are mounted in my mount scripts because some systems rely on SAN snapshots, and sometimes those snapshots are taken when the file system can be in an inconsistent state. If the file system is clean the fsck aborts and the file system is mounted.

nate