Re: How do I fsck an XFS file system in "Squeeze"

[lrhorer <lrhorer@satx.rr.com>]

Stan Hoeppner wrote:

> lrhorer put forth on 5/20/2010 6:09 PM:
>> 
>>         OK, I'm stumped.  I was having some problems which were
>>         likely related
>> to the old kernel in Debian "Lenny", so I upgraded to "Squeeze" in
>> order to alleviate the issue, which it apparently has.  Now, however,
>> I
>> need to fsck the main array on the box, which is formatted as XFS. 
>> The
>> xfs-repair utility is not on the upgraded system.  (I was forced to
>> do
>> a fresh install of the boot drive.)  How can I obtain the XFS file
>> utilities - particularly xfs-repair - under "Squeeze"?
> 
> Unless you're seeing XFS errors in your logs or on the console you
> don't
> need to run xfs_check or xfs_repair.  Typically these tools are only
> used when an XFS filesytem becomes damaged badly enough that it won't
> mount, or when XFS logs serious errors.
> 
> For the most part XFS is self healing but for the most serious errors,
> which
> usually result from defective disk and/or controller hardware.  XFS
> journal replay after power outages and kernel panics will either
> delete or zero files and directories that weren't fully written at the
> time of the crash, but the XFS filesystem itself will be fully intact.
> 
> What is it that leads you to believe you need to perform a filesystem
> check or repair on your XFS filesystem?

        Well, first of all, even if it is not needed now, it may be in the
future.  To answer your question, however, it was needed because the
underlying array suffered a catastrophic failure, and has since been
rebuilt.  Having rebuilt the array, and knowing that at least some data
had possibly been lost at the block device level, it is at least
prudent to double-check the health of the file system structures. 
Indeed, xfs_repair found and repaired some corrupted structures.  The
files were extracted and re-written to the drive from storage using
rsync.

        The simple answer to my original question was, "xfsprogs".  Doing a
synaptic search for "xfs" returns far, far too many results through
which to easily sift, and searching for "xfs_repair" returns none at
all.