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There's a new "feature" added to mountall in Ubuntu recently (in 9.10 I think) whereby the bootup sequence doesn't wait for the scheduled fsck to finish on non-essential disks, and runs it in the background instead. This is a nice idea in theory, but "essential" is defined by them as / and /home so if you have any bootup scripts on another partition you are screwed as the machine will be unusable. I'm clearly not the only person to have been caught by this given the size of discussion on bug 439604. User nomenquis summed it up best with "Just imagine a mail server happily accepting (and storing) mail data to /mnt/mail even though /mnt/mail is not really mounted."
The workaround is to add a bootwait parameter to the appropriate line(s) in /etc/fstab thus: UUID=5535671a-baed-44b0-aa6e-ccce016b2715 /mnt/mail ext3 errors=remount-ro,bootwait 0 1
If you want to test it run sudo touch /forcefsck, to (surprise surprise) force a fsck on next boot. The file will be automatically deleted afterwards.
I can't help thinking that having bootwait as the default and letting experienced people insert nobootwait if they want it to run in the background would have been the better option. This smells like some glory hunters put a lot of work into this new feature and are going to make damned sure we appreciate it, whether we like it or not. This is the kind of power-trip that will give Ubuntu a bad name.
The full comments on the bug, which has the snappy title "boot process isn't paused while fsck runs on partition: boot process is completed with fsck running in the background preventing partition from mounting", makes for entertaining reading.
UPDATE: I ranted to a few mates about "Fucking Ubuntu Glory Hunters" and Hannes quite succinctly pointed out the root cause. One wonders how long it'll be before we hear about Ubuntu "leveraging its core competencies by thinking outside the box to alter the paradigm".
from hannes
to Cian Masterson
date 13 April 2010 22:53
subject Re: Fucking Ubuntu Glory Hunters
Metrics are great.
Take something you can measure, and set a defined goal! "10 second
boot time"! The papers will love it, and any dumbass middle manager
can look at his powerpoint and see the checkmark saying that you
succeeded!
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2009-June/028308.html
Of course, subtleties like "idle CPU and Disk" and "deferring services
is not an option unless done properly" don't really fit on that
powerpoint, so they'll get lost along the way.
But hey, 10 second boot time!
Disappointing stuff from the ubunters. Especially since Windows had
already demonstrated how doing this kind of optimisation wrong gives
you a worse user experience: In theory the GUI is up and running after
N seconds, but everyone knows you better not try to click on anything
until all the background work of booting up the "deferred" stuff is
finished.
Hannes
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