operation not permitted on entropy file

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2014 09:52:00 -0500, Adam Vande More wrote:
> Try fsck'ing a nearly full TB FS on a production box that has had a dirty
> unmount and you will begin to appreciate the adventure a bit more.

I prefer appreciating my precious data. :-)

No, honestly: On production systems, this might be an issue
(which should be resolved by appropriate countermeasures, as
we're probably talking about mission-critical systems), but
for home systems, it surely isn't that bad. I'm saying this
from my very individual experience of having fsck work on
a nearly full 1 TB disk several times a week, in worst cases,
few times a day. And I don't even care that it takes more
than 10 minutes, as it makes sure my data is safe.



> > And if I don't have
> > soft updates by default, then why are they being reported by fsck?
> >
> 
> This statement doesn't make sense.  Can you post the output you're seeing
> along with the mount options in play?

Having _no_ soft updates is probably only true for / when the
traditional partitioned layout has been chosen in the installer
(that is, for sysinstall; I don't know bsdinstall's defaults
from my memory). All other partitions are usually initialized
with soft updates enabled.

Here's an example (restricted to disks):

	% mount
	/dev/ad4s1a on / (ufs, local)
	/dev/ad4s1d on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ad4s1e on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ad4s1f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ad4s1g on /opt (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ad6 on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)

As you can see, only / doesn't have soft updates enabled. This
is the choice I made in sysinstall (FreeBSD 8 here) when the
disk was new.



> > And for reference, I notice that journaling decisions need to be made
> > *prior* to creating the filesystem.
> >
> 
> Journaling decisions can be made basically at anytime the FS isn't mounted
> or mounted ro using tunefs(1).

The safest way to change those settings is to enter single user
mode and use tunefs on the unmounted partitions.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...