LPI Linux Certification/Maintaining A Linux File System
Detailed Objective
Weight: 4
Description:
Candidates should be able to properly maintain a Linux filesystem using system utilities. This objective includes manipulating standard filesystems.
- Key knowledge area(s):
- Tools and utilities to manipulate and ext2 and ext3
- Tools and utilities to manipulate reiserfs (V3 and V4)
- The following is a partial list of the used files, terms and utilities:
- fsck (fsck.ext2, fsck.reiserfs)
- badblocks
- mkfs (mkfs.ext2, mkfs.reiserfs)
- dumpe2fs
- debugfs, debugreiserfs
- tune2fs, reiserfstune
Formatting a partition
Before you format a partition you need to choose the right filesystem for your needs. The most common filesystem on linux is ext3 which is a journaled filesystem based on ext2. To format a partition with a filesystem you need to use the mkfs.* commands
#ext3 mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 #fat mkfs.vfat /dev/hda1 #xfs mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 #reiserfs mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hda1
to create an ext2/ext3 filesystem you can also use the mke2fs utility
#ext2 mke2fs /dev/hda1 #ext3 mke2fs -j /dev/hda1
Configuring and repair filesystem
tune2fs it's an utility used to tune ext2/ext3 filesystem
#add the journal to an ext2 filesystem(convert from ext2 to ext3) tune2fs -j /dev/hda1 #set the max mount count before the filesystem is checked for errors to 30 tune2fs -c 30 /dev/hda1 #set the max time before the filesystem is checked for errors to 10 days tune2fs -i 10d /dev/hda1
you can also tune a reiserfs partition using reiserfstune
#create a new journal for /dev/hda1 into /dev/hda2 reiserfstune --journal-new-device /dev/hda2 -f /dev/hda1
to check a filesystem for errors you can use fsck.*
#ext3 fsck.ext3 /dev/hda1 #fat fsck.vfat /dev/hda1 #xfs fsck.xfs /dev/hda1 #reiserfs fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda1
you can also just run fsck /dev/hda1 directly and it will detect the filesystem