I had to run a test for a client before one of our Aventail boxes was sent out. Their main concern was the hard-disk and filesystem stability since they had some issue previously. The SonicWALL Aventail boxes are basically heavily-customised Debian machines. Here’s how I went about testing the filesystem:
telinit 1 # this tells the machine to go into run level 1. Run level 1 is the linux equivalent of the windows “safe mode”. It stops all running programs leaving only minimal load on the system, allowing us to perform testing without crashing any other processes.
At this point I wanted to run the filesystem check on the root mount. The filesystem check is done by running the command fschk, and to safeguard the file system, we re-mount the root filesystem as a read-only:
>mount -o ro,remount /dev/sda6 # in this case, the root filesystem was located on /dev/sda6. The -ro specified read only
>fsck /dev/sda6
fsck 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
e2fsck 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
/dev/sda6: clean, 23747/1064960 files, 172314/2128604 blocks
The output shows a clean hard-disk. Another way is by using the dumpe2fs command, which dumps filesystem information:
> dumpe2fs /dev/sda6 > HardDiskcheck.log
Filesystem volume name: <none>
Last mounted on: <not available>
Filesystem UUID: a78b3a89-5c4c-4e28-9062-b88861348a47
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: has_journal filetype needs_recovery sparse_super
Default mount options: (none)
Filesystem state: clean
Again, we see a clean filesystem
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