It's been a long June. I noticed early on that an update in Debian testing had moved mke2fs from one package to another without getting all the library dependencies right. As such I spent June without the ability to lay down a filesystem on a new partition with the 'proper' tool. Part of my series on logfile reading includes a task to review the 'percent full' for each partition (and to relocate or clean out fat ones) to avoid running out of room in a self-inficted denial of services attack
I tried the obvious fallback to build a new filesystem: busybox but the version found in Debian Testing was lacking a needed build time switch. I filed the bug, and considered a local patch, or perhaps whether to rebuild of part of the chain needed to fork mkfs for a bit, but my need for space to reorganize a host's files was not that great nor urgent. Just pesky each day to see
I knew from reading the bug reports that the fix had been committed and 'ageing' in the Debian fashion to its move from an Unstable 'nightly' to a mildly tested (or at least not black-balled) state and promotion into Testing
nfs2:~# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
ksysguard libdevmapper1.02.1
The following packages will be upgraded:
bsdutils e2fslibs e2fsprogs iptables iso-codes libblkid1 libcomerr2
libenchant1c2a libffcall1 libmime-tools-perl libnetpbm10 libss2 libuuid1
lockfile-progs mount mutt netpbm shared-desktop-ontologies util-linux
19 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 9,841kB of archives.
After this operation, 115kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
...
nfs2:~# I've been running repository data update operations daily .. the Debian approach is more measured in its pace than we use with CentOS, and I think we may have something to learn there. It is a rare package update that cannot wait for a daily repo data update, push and mirror overnight in our space, and it would avoid much confusion to casual sysadmins
Those bolded packages in that clutch of upgrades looks promising ...
nfs2:~# mkfs /dev/sda12
mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
237568 inodes, 949835 blocks
47491 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=973078528
29 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736
Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
This filesystem will be automatically checked every 28 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
nfs2:~# date
Thu Jun 24 10:13:17 EDT 2010
nfs2:~# Lovely; I'm back in business
