Howto maintain an EXT3 filesystem
- by Reinoud van Santen
Lately I had several servers which encountered a write error on an EXT3 filesystem and as a result of that remounted the filesystem read-only. Understandably on a production server this causes severe problems. On a reboot the filesystem where fixed but on large partitions this takes a lot of time. After the filesystem was fixed, correcting several errors, the server runs well again.
What can I do to minimize the rate at which this happens? I can't seem to find much information on periodically checking the filesystem(s) on a running server. Is it possible to change the way in which EXT3 / the system handles write errors? What would be a sane solution.
All servers which this is regarding to are running CentOS Linux 5.4 or 5.5.