[CentOS] reboot - is there a timeout on filesystem flush?

Wed Jan 7 13:53:24 UTC 2015
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 12:10 AM, Keith Keller
<kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
> On 2015-01-07, Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Of course, the other possibility is simply that you've formatted your
>> own filesystems, and they have a maximum mount count or a check
>> interval.
>
> If Les is having to run fsck manually, as he wrote in his OP, then this
> is unlikely to be the cause of the issues he described in that post.
> There must be some sort of errors on the filesystem that caused the
> unattended fsck to exit nonzero.
>

Yes - the unattended fsck fails.   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.  Some of these have been on VMware
ESXi hosts where the physical host wasn't rebooted and the
controller/power not involved at all.  Eventually these will be
replaced with CentOS7 systems, probably using XFS but I don't know if
that will be better or worse.   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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com