[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#728305: initscripts: checkfs.sh fails trying to fsck an unavailable device

[Frank Van Damme]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.88dsf-41+deb7u1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

On boot, the init script "checkfs.sh" executes fsck on all devices in fstab. In case a device doesn't exist or can't be accessed, fsck will fail with an error.

The situation that made this an issue for me is the following (addmitted: a corner case, and not an example of good practise). I have an LVM VG that spans both local storage and an iscsi device. To avoid mounting it too early in the boot process, there is the _netdev mount option in fstab which makes sure the device only gets mounted after bringing up the network. So devices get mounted, open-iscsi logs in to its target, then the iscsi devices are mounted. There seems to be no equivalent mechanism for fsck however. 

Since the VG is partly local, it is already detected in the lvm init script. There is one LV that uses space on (is entirely on) the iscsi volume and thus it isn't activated. Enter the checkfs.sh init script: fsck sees the device and can't check it. 

I guess if it is desirable to take situations like this into account, it could also be solved by being able to choose VGS which should not be activated on boot (N.B. the open-iscsi init script can activate VGs by itself as a configuration option). 




-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'stable-updates')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/24 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  coreutils       8.13-3.5
ii  debianutils     4.3.2
ii  libc6           2.13-38
ii  lsb-base        4.1+Debian8+deb7u1
ii  mount           2.20.1-5.3
ii  sysv-rc         2.88dsf-41+deb7u1
ii  sysvinit-utils  2.88dsf-41+deb7u1

Versions of packages initscripts recommends:
ii  e2fsprogs  1.42.5-1.1
ii  psmisc     22.19-1+deb7u1

initscripts suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information