fsck on ext3 drives. Do we need to routinely? how to shut off or change 30 boot/180 day settings or why should I not?

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@verizon.net>]

Hi,

Currently my debian installs seem to default to running fsck on ext3 file 
systems during bootup after 30 boots I believe.

I noticed that never happened in the old days  when I ran redhat/fedora. They 
did away with this routine fsck (sometime around 6.2 -> 7 or 7.2 transition 
as I recall) when they switched from ext2 to ext3 as I recall.

This occurs during /etc/rcS.d/S30check-fs entry 
entry during boot, right after file system mount, I believe.

Is this neccessary on debian if we have journaled file systems? After all it 
made sense for ext2 but do we need this for ext3? 

Maybe I am really not supposed to reboot my machine? 
But how can I stop 180 days from passing? 
:) 

1. How do I modify this to 100 boots or 500 days or never?

2. Can anyone give me references that give a scholarly technical analysis of 
this concept and a discussion of why it is still neccesary?

Thanks
Mitchell Laks