[TriLUG] e2fsck under cron gets retcode=8 operational error

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2012, Thomas Gardner wrote:

> So, since you found that a bunch of other people were 
> having this problem, and that none of them were able to 
> figure it out, you're going to go grab the source for 
> fsck, find the offending error message, change it, submit 
> the patch upstream, and become the unsung hero to hundreds 
> that follow behind you, right?


right ;-\

I spent the evening once drinking with (among others) Ted. 
>From what I saw, I don't think he'd regard changes to 
something that he set in stone 20yrs ago as being an 
improvement.

This goes for much of Linux. The output of many unix tools 
is not machine readable. You should design the output of 
tools as if they're always going to be read by a machine. 
You shouldn't have people monitoring machines; machines 
should monitor machines.

eg the output of df: if the name of the device or the output 
is too long, df puts a <cr> in the middle of the line, 
splitting the output into two lines. Now you can't grep for 
a device and expect to find the mount point because they're 
on different lines. I don't know how you're supposed to do 
it.

I can't imagine the author of df accepting patches to make 
the output machine readable either.

For the fsck problem, presumably I should post the answer 
to the various forums, but then I'd have to get an 
account..., just for one posting - no way.

I was the HOWTO author for the LinuxVirtualServer project 
for 10yrs. The configuration utility, ipvsadm, was not 
idempotent, making it unscriptable. Using ifconfig as an 
example.

# ifconfig eth2
.
           inet addr:192.168.1.5  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
.

Let's say you want to set the IP on eth2 to some address, 
and you don't know or care what state eth2 is in

# ifconfig eth2 192.168.1.5
.
just works.

With ipvsadm, it would give an error if you put an entry 
that was already there. To script everything you had to do

ipvsadm --show-entryies

if !$entry; insert entry.

It was crazy.

> Oh, the beauty of OSS.  :-)

it's a mixed blessing. I wouldn't go back, but FOSS is not a 
perfect world either.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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