Re: [gentoo-user] Re: A little light relief from endless problems

[Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb@nyu.edu>]

At Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:27:17 +0200 Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:

> Allan Gottlieb wrote:
>> At Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:57:30 +0200 Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de> wrote:
>>
>>> Peter Humphrey wrote:
>>>> As it's Sunday, here's an odd little thing.
>>>>
>>>> Not long ago, while booting this machine, four ext3 partitions
>>>> needed checks on remount count reaching zero. They had been set to
>>>> 23, 24, 25 and 26 mounts. (I didn't choose the numbers; they were
>>>> allocated at the time I was creating the file system.)
>>>>
>>>> Now, this box does get rebooted, but hardly 23 x 24 x 25 x 26 =
>>>> 358,800 times all told. At, say, two reboots per day, that would
>>>> take rather a long time: a little under 500 years if my arithmetic
>>>> is working.
>>> I think you're confused.  23 means a check each 23 mounts.  With 2
>>> mounts per day, that's a check every 12 days for the first and second
>>> disk.
>>
>> I think the point is that 23, 24, 25, 26 are relatively prime so that,
>> if N is initially zero, it takes 23x24x25x26 increments initially for (N
>> mod 23), ..., (N mod 26) to all again be zero.
>
> Why would it matter if they're all zero or not?

When they are all zero they fsck is triggered.  So it was not surprising
that all the fsck's occurred.  What was surprising is that they all
triggered at the same reboot.

allan