washer@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV (Jim Washer) (02/19/89)
WARNING: /etc/mountall
has a slight design flaw that can 'eat' slices of disk.
As distributed ( on at least three vendors systems i have access to)
/etc/mountall looks something like this
cat ${fstab} |
while read dev fs fsflags fstype dummy
do
.
.
fsck -y -D ${dev}
.
.
done
This works just fine on most systems, but if you have any slices larger
than ~500MB fsck will ask for a scratch file name. Unfortunately,
its standard input is being redirected from /etc/fstab. Sooo fsck
uses the next slice in your fstab as its scratch file for this slice.
A simple work around is to add the '-t' option to the fsck command line
something like this
fsck -y -t /tmp/scratch -D....
Note this might get you in trouble if the slice that contains your tmp
directory is larger than 500Mb( but most are not).
Forgive me if this is already 'well known'. No one i asked had ever come
across it before.
James Washer
North West Software Enterprises
883 Lester Ave.
Hayward, Ca 94541
(415) 782-NWSE
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