Is there any tool that will unmount a filesystem and fsck say once every 2-3 months to avoid having the massive slow fsck on the reboot every 6-12 months?
If not I am thinking of a cron job that tries to umount the filesystem in the middle of the night, run a basic fsck and if all goes well remounts it mailing the results to root.
I have a modest root/usr partitions but the larger other partitions only used for recording TV take 30+ minutes to do the occasional fsck and that always is demanded sometimes very inconveniently on a reboot.
I wonder if the following would be valid, assuming you are using LVM: 1. take an LVM snapshot 2. fsck the LVM snapshot 3. if the fsck of the snapshot is good, reset the mount count and/or time last checked interval of the origin fs. If the fsck was bad, do the unmount and fsck (or mark the fs as requiring an fsck next boot if the fs cannot be unmounted) 4. email the results This would allow you to do it at any time of the day or night, even if you were recording the late late movie. Being a journaling filesystem you shouldn't get any fsck inconsistencies introduced by the "crash consistent" snapshot process. I do this sort of check under Windows which has its own built-in snapshotting, so if C: drive is currently in use (as it always is) chkdsk c: will automatically take a snapshot and do a read-only chkdsk against the snapshot. If any problems are found then a reboot will be arranged, although chkdsk errors on a windows system typically indicate a major hardware problem so further investigation is required. James