Hi
I've been using FreeBSD on my server for a year now, and I'm mostly quite happy.
There is only one thing that bothers me (a bit too much) and that is file system inconsistencies which has happened a couple of times. Both times the cause was an unclean shutdown (power was lost).
I first installed FreeBSD 8.1 on UFS, and had the first crash after a few weeks. After upgrading to FreeBSD 9.0 I just now had the second crash.
Running fsck (as advised) cleaned up the file system inconsistencies both times, but when the result is that files are missing or contain the wrong content, I find it hard to trust the system. The last fsck caused /etc/fstab to contain the content of the /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file was missing.
Also the content of /etc/ssh/sshd_config appeared in some other files as well. A lot of other "fixes" were also made.
Needless to say, it wouldn't boot, so it took quite some time to fix.
Having backup of /etc/ I could find the changes in that directory with diff, but there could be changes in other directories I don't know about.
So the question I have is: is this "just the way it has to be" when running FreeBSD on UFS, or are there tricks to avoid this from happening? Is UFS really that fragile when it come to unclean shutdowns?
I've been using FreeBSD on my server for a year now, and I'm mostly quite happy.
There is only one thing that bothers me (a bit too much) and that is file system inconsistencies which has happened a couple of times. Both times the cause was an unclean shutdown (power was lost).
I first installed FreeBSD 8.1 on UFS, and had the first crash after a few weeks. After upgrading to FreeBSD 9.0 I just now had the second crash.
Running fsck (as advised) cleaned up the file system inconsistencies both times, but when the result is that files are missing or contain the wrong content, I find it hard to trust the system. The last fsck caused /etc/fstab to contain the content of the /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file was missing.
Also the content of /etc/ssh/sshd_config appeared in some other files as well. A lot of other "fixes" were also made.
Needless to say, it wouldn't boot, so it took quite some time to fix.
Having backup of /etc/ I could find the changes in that directory with diff, but there could be changes in other directories I don't know about.
So the question I have is: is this "just the way it has to be" when running FreeBSD on UFS, or are there tricks to avoid this from happening? Is UFS really that fragile when it come to unclean shutdowns?