Preventing ext3 fsck at boot?

I've got a number of large EXT3 filesystems (2-8 TB each), presented via dual-path Fibre HBAs via SAN switches from several Nexsan SATAbeast arrays, to a number of systems running RHEL4.

The question of whether EXT3 is the right filesystem to be using for this is probably best saved for another email (but I'd love to hear about better options; I'm relatively new to Linux, compared to AIX and Solaris.)

My main problem is that when we reboot these servers for scheduled maintenance (or for any reason), odds are pretty good that I'm going to get the (dreaded) ...

        /dev/nsvg/lvol0 has gone 182 days without being checked, check forced.

... message, and then my downtime is extended by 2-3 hours while the system does its fsck (and usually finds o problems.)

So, my questions are:

• The man page for tune2fs says that this can be disabled with the "- c" option, but recommends strongly against it. Is it really such a bad thing to disable, if I'm using EXT3 (with the journaling that makes it "3" instead of "2")? I've used JFS/JFS2 for years on AIX, and UFS journaling on Solaris, and neither seems to want to force an fsck just because some arbitrary time period has past since it last checked.
• If the consensus is that it would be ok to disable these checks, what is the proper syntax? I tried:

	# tune2fs -c0  /dev/mapper/nsvg-lvol0
	tune2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
	Setting maximal mount count to -1

... but that didn't work. Looking for some practical advice and recommendations, here, please!

Thanks,

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Sandor W. Sklar
Unix Systems Administrator
Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources (SULAIR)
Digital Libraries Systems & Services (DLSS)


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