On 10/10/99 02:59:52 you wrote:
"alexei" == alexei alexei@mindspring.net writes:
this rather distressing. The filer really needs a way to perform a filesystem health check w/o downtime.
alexei> Like running fsck on a mounted filesystem? Some things are alexei> better done in a quiesced state...
The filer is not a Unix host serving NFS. I expect more out of it. I didn't say it needed to correct errors while serving content, I said it needed to be able to do a health-check. If you go back to my original message, I mentioned that if it required an immutable filesystem to do this, then you should be able to tag a filesystem (not just an export) read only.
The raid scrubbing is indeed meant to be such a check, although it is not filesystem-based.
You can btw, run fsck on a mounted filesystem. Solaris happily runs 'fsck -n' on a mounted file system (yes, I know, it will also happily run 'rm -rf /' which doesn't mean you should do it - lot's of rope and whatnot). Linux will run e2fsck after making some noise. I don't see any reason why this would be dangerous on a filesystem mounted read only.
The problem is that with a changing filesystem, such programs could easily report a problem when in fact there is none. There are some ways around this.
Personally, while I think this should be on Netapp's agenda, there are more important things as well. Wack has been improved and now runs much faster than before. You should expect some downtime to happen when problems occur; having parity inconsistencies is *not* a normal occurrance and should not happen often.
Bruce