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For fsck's sake

Debian is great on headless servers but there's one really annoying issue...

A while ago I hacked my HP MediaVault 5020 to run Debian and it's been working really well. Debian provides me with the ability to tweak the OS to my liking and install absolutely any software I want.

However, when running in headless mode, there's one annoying problem with Debian on a NAS - fsck!

Like most Linux based machines, disks sometimes develop errors from being shutdown forcefully or whatever, and cleverly the MediaVault informs the user of such issues by displaying a purple light on the front panel.

The snag is, in the background the machine is likely to be waiting for user input, as the e2fsck program it uses for file system checking requires the user to agree to the disk check.

With a headless machine this is something of an annoyance because there's no command prompt or display to see. You can't SSH or telnet into the machine, as it hasn't booted, and you can't view the feedback on a serial console because the MediaVault doesn't have one.

In order to fix it you need to remove the affected drive and mount it in another Linux box and run e2fsck from there and then reinstall the drive in the Media Vault.

According to former Debian-leader Martin Michlmayr, who does lots of work on Debian on alternative devices such as the Media Vault, Debian will eventually configure e2fsck to automatically provide a 'Yes' response on headless boxes, such as NAS devices.

Martin says the setting in question is /etc/default/rcS and it needs a value of FSCKFIX=Y.

Maybe whipping out the drive, running e2fsck and then changing this setting will solve my headless disk checking problems forever...

Update: Apparently not. Upon checking /etc/default/rcS FSCKFIX is already set to yes, so it appears that this may not be the answer to my problems.