[bitfolk] Opinions on disabling time-based fsck

Hello,

As you may know, ext3 filesystem is by default set to require a fsck
at boot time based on both elapsed time since last fsck and number
of mounts since last fsck.

The time-based fsck can be painful, because when one of BitFolk's
servers is rebooted a high proportion of the VPSes on it won't have
been rebooted inside this time period (typically 6 months).
Therefore almost every VPS will fsck its filesystems at the same
time, causing massive IO load and a slow boot for everyone.

Having now realised this, I'm considering disabling the time-based
fsck by default.

Would it bother you to discover your VPS had been provided with
time-based fsck disabled?

Would it bother you if you one day discovered that time-based fsck
had been disabled for you without your knowledge since you aren't on
this mailing list?

In case you're interested, you can see the current settings like
this:

$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/xvda | grep -i 'check\|mount count'
Mount count:              2
Maximum mount count:      34
Last checked:             Sat Oct 17 09:10:33 2009
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Thu Apr 15 09:10:33 2010

And you can disable time-based fsck like this:

$ sudo tune2fs -i 0 /dev/xvda
tune2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Setting interval between checks to 0 seconds

$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/xvda | grep -i 'check\|mount count'
Mount count:              2
Maximum mount count:      34
Last checked:             Sat Oct 17 09:10:33 2009
Check interval:           0 (<none>)

(replace /dev/xvda with whatever your partitions are -- see
/proc/partitions)

Cheers,
Andy

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