NASLite Network Attached Storage

Playing with E2fsck and i noticed that the version on NL is:

E2fsprogs 1.27 (March 8, 2002)
Thinking that looked a bit to old a quick google showed there have been many releases (12) of E2fsprogs since this date.

The release notes here:

http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/e2fsprogs-release.html


show many bug fixes and improvements to E2fsck since this release.

This may explain why E2fsck works for me in some scenarios using say Knoppix and not NL.

Is there a reason we cant have the new one?

Ta

e2fsprogs v1.27 is complete and stable, covering all features necessary for proper filesystem management within the context of NASLite. Later versions provide many additional features that are not used by NASlite.

It is important for one to keep in mind that the actual fielsystem utilization is performed by the kernel and not by the ext2/3 tools themselves. The only responsibility the ext2/3 tools actually have is filesystem creation and filesystem repair.

I know that there are reports on this forum of filesystem problems that have required repair tools outside those provided by NASLite. We are not sure what to make of those since we have never had a case where the filesystem repair functions provided inside the NASLite administration interface have failed to correct filesystem problems. I think we've simulated everything from power outages to downright hardware trashing by disconnecting IDE/SATA and power cables during active reads and writes. In all cases the manual filesystem check and repair has been successful.

That said, the reason for using v1.27 should be pretty obvious - it's stable, compact and fully capable of accommodating the needs of a NASLite server. We feel that upgrading to 1.39 or current will provide little if any benefit while increasing overall size and resource requirements.

I hope that makes sense. As always, both Ralph and I are open to suggestions, so if you can sight a compelling reason otherwise, please post.

I sympathise. Its extraordinarily difficult to replicate on a bench every variable especially the out of the ordinary ones.

I have no real evidence and cannot prove anything all i can say is that twice now with a power outage on my "mess about box" NL failed to repair even after several runs of the tool but doing it with Knoppix (actually Kanotix which is now Sidux) repaired it in a single pass.

Since there is no black magic here all i can propose is that the newer versions are better are repairing than the old one.

I cant comment on how much extra resources/space/dev time implementing the new version would be but IMHO if there is a even a slight chance it works better then since this is a crucial element of NL it should be introduced.

i.e. if it works 0.01% better at a repair then I want that 100MB of data back from my 1TB NAS.

Can yo describe the process that you went through. the version that you used and the error that you got indicating a failed attempt? I'd be very reluctant to make a change without having an explicit reason for doing so.

Unfortunately i never kept notes i was more interested in making it work.

In general however the process was:

Boot NL
Disk failed to come up
Use NL check and repair tool
NL reports disk repaired
NL says reboot to mount disk (kinda weird that)
Reboot
Disk failed to come up
...
repeat 3-4 times

Disk would not come up.


With Kanotix

Remove NL disk
Boot in Kanotix box
run e2fsck
disk repaired
disk can mount
put disk back in NL
boot NL
disk working

OK, Let's get some data and see if we can identify a behavior. The problem may well be the way we are approaching the problem and not the binary. If such is the case we need to fix the invocation of the function and not the function itself.

Are there other folks that experience the same problem. Explicitly, the check and repair tool completes successfully, yet on reboot the disks fails to mount. If so, please speak up and provide some details that will allow us to identify the cause.

The administrative option in question is the Check and Repair Disk-N Filesystem (Option 6) of the DISK-N CONFIGURATION MENU.