[SGVLUG] rsnapshot: the good and the bad - recovery after patching that goes very very wrong

[Claude Felizardo]

On 5/13/07, David Lawyer <dave at lafn.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 08:42:53AM -0700, Claude Felizardo wrote:
> > First, what's the best way to defer fsck of a large filesystem when
> > rebooting?  I have a rather large filesystem with thousands of hard
> > links that takes forever to run fsck, especially when there are
> > several errors and I have to reboot over and over.
>
> I seldom run fsck on my Pentium-1 PC since I've set it to seldom run
> using tune2fs.  Use the -l option to list the current status.  I've
> set mine to a max. mount count of 300, and a "check interval" of
> infinity.  Also, I use ext3 so if someone (like my wife) pulls the
> plug, it fixes the resulting problem on reboot without running fsck.

well the problem is this machine is used as the fileserver so it
rarely gets shutdown.  like during power outages so sometimes its been
running for months and months.  So I do want it to run fsck
occasionally.  I just want to defer it on the last two partitions
which hold the media and the snapshots since they aren't needed at
boot.


> > Here's the story of a patch job going horribly wrong and how rsnapshot
> > came to my rescue but stalling a full startup...
>
> Do you mean that you are patching source code and then compiling?  If
> the "patch" fails, shouldn't it not install anything so that it will
> work as before?

no, i was applying binary patches.  something went wrong.  not sure
what but it was applying quite a few updates to things like samba,
system libraries, etc.  So basically I had a corrupted system that was
sorta running for several hours doing who knows what. I imagine the
logs were still being updated but the rsnapshot backups are set to run
every few hours so that may have been what corrupted that partition.

I tried looking at the logs but of course they got wiped when I did
the big restore.  I suppose I could try and point to an updated mirror
but I don't want to go that route again.  I'll hold off until I can
find time to swap in the newer boot disk with the latest distro.

btw, I did run a full backup to an external disk.   The last OS backup
was Dec 06 and the previous was Feb 06.  But all important data was
backed up just a week prior.

claude